What to do with green caterpillars eating snap pea leaves

This is my 1st year growing snap peas. I have them in my earthbox along with green beans. Green bean leaves are totally fine, but snap pea leaves were getting a lot of holes and some of the leaves were looking almost lace like with so many holes. I first thought snails/slugs were eating them so I did the snail/slug treatment (copper tape and iron phosphate) but things weren't getting any better. Today I looked really closely and found 5 tiny green caterpillars on them. They are only about half an inch in length and yellow green in color. As I picked up one of them, it excreted dark green liquid (which might have been snap pea leaf juice it had consumed) - Yuck!

Anyway, I picked each of them off leaves and stepped on them to kill them, but in the future, I would like to find some other effective way to deal with this problem, and hopefully, the way is organic.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

tmm

Bt? Or have your kids or grandkids pick them off every day?

Toady I harvest a cok choy that had a few holes in it. I checked all my other brassicas and they had many of these worms you mentioned. I might warn you, the more they eat, the bigger they get! I picked and rubbed them off, squished them good. Speayed a homemade concoction I got the recipe for here at DG. Water, 1 cup sugar, 3 ounces H2O2. Don't know yet if this worked. Edited to add, we had a hot dry sunny day today, and parts of the plants that had this spray (and were in direct sun), have "burned" places on them. So be careful when using this concoction (got it from the Brug Forum) on veggies...

But as far as prevention and control, I only found 3 worms on the entire bok choy, and it was over 2 foot wide, the biggest plant. They was a lady bug larvae, a lady bug pupae case, a lady bug, a crab spider, a hover fly, and a wap all visiting it when I was. THey were keeping th population down. I hope they go and visit the other plants now.

Guess i need to check my peas next!

This message was edited May 22, 2005 10:56 PM

Spraying with Bt (Bacillus Thurengensis) will control any and all types of caterpillars organically.

Bt is a soil borne bacteria that causes the digestive systems of the caterpillars to go haywire.

Basically they die of a tummy ache.

Bt is totally harmless to anything other than caterpillars, including us.

There is no waiting period between spraying and harvesting.

Apply the spray, wait three days, and apply again. Wait 5 days and apply again. Then apply every 7 to 10 days or as you see more worms.

The Bt has to be eaten to be effective. The worms will stop eating within a couple of days of eating it and then they die.

Remember to try to spray both the tops and bottoms of the leaves.

Good Gardening!

Aubrey

**If the worms are rolling up the leaves (usually on beans) they are probably "Bean Leaf Rollers" which are the larvae of butterflies. It is up to you if you want to eliminate those.