Urrrrghhh!

I spend one hour in the garden this morning, not exactly intended to do so but was given a shock when I spotted a caterpillar on my growing oriental radishes! The same pesky green caterpillar with a light yellow stripe along its back! The same one which attacked my buk choy! The same one which attacked my nasturtiums!

Caterpillar eggs and some bugs which look like aphids on the underside of radish leaves .

I pulled up the three buk choys because it seemed that one of the leaves still looked chewed on (with many holes) despite having a cage over the whole pot. Inspecting closer, which any organic gardener must always do, I found many caterpillar eggs attached to the underside of the leaves. An awakening! I was reminded by the bunch of buk choy leaves I cut and fed to the worms in the worm farm sometime last week. Few days after that, I kept seeing caterpillars in the worm farm. I realised that the eggs were still attached to the leaves and they were hatching into caterpillars! Also the bucket of water which I washed the buk choy leaves contained dislodged eggs, which hatched baby caterpillars but they were drowned in the water!

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Recalling all that, I decided it was no point keeping the buk choy as the eggs on the growing leaves would continue to hatch! It is a never-ending cycle since I do not want to use pesticide. Anyway, I have harvested several rounds out of these three buk choys. It is time to sow new seeds. This knowledge helped me! I quickly inspected all the under leaves of the radishes and sure enough, three radish plants had loads of eggs attached. I had no choice but to pull up the radishes or I would have a continual flow of caterpillars. Urrrghhh!!! I noted that the eggs were on the smaller radishes and the larger, healthier, stronger ones are spared. I have sown seeds to replace the pulled up ones.

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Next action was to net the whole area! I was already contemplating that a while ago to deter possums which might dig, but now I am detering the butterflies! I managed to do so quite easily, all thanks to my tall sunflower stems! I also placed the nasturtiums under the netting on the radish patch because they do get attacked by the caterpillars too.

Netting over the radishes with support from the sunflower stems.

The pot of lovely nasturtiums under the net's protection now. The three buk choys were pulled up and made way for new ones, under the netting.

The cage was used on the capsicum plants instead against possums.

In the afternoon while the weather was warm and sunny, I potted the kaffir lime stem cuttings in a mixture of premium + regular potting mix and propagating sand after coating them with rooting hormone powder. If this works, it will be a long wait and I have to keep the potting mix warm and moist all the time. I also sowed more buk choy seeds in the same pot where I have pulled out the existing ones.