Vegan MoFo

Well summer has wrapped up but the garden is still growing strong! In two days it will be the start of Vegan MoFo- Month of Food. The idea is to write a blog post about vegan food at least 1 per weekday for the entire month of October. Obviously, my past productivity is not the greatest, but I'm going to try and participate. My plan is to update the blog with all of the photos of my garden and food I made from it over the summer. I will still probably put them in proper chronological order, so you may have to scroll down to see the MoFo posts I write in October. They will all have the MoFo tags so they can be easily identified though. Anyhow, I better get uploading! Only two days to get all my pics online....

Attack of the Killer Cabbage Worms

I woke up this fine Saturday morning, took the dog out and had a look at my garden. To my surprise I saw tons of tiny little greenish-black poop-looking things all over the lettuce.

After a bit of research and help from Kittee at theppk.com, I discovered that my fall crop was infested with the lowly imported cabbage worm. And all that time I spent catching the pretty white butterfly with my net when I was little, who knew they were pure evil to lettuce, kale, beets and turnips?


Luckily I caught them in time and not much damage was done. I combed the bed, looking at every leaf, and found about 6 - 10 of them lurking. The worst part was killing the poor things. As a vegan I hate to kill anything, but of course anytime you cut down a plant there are insects making their home in it that will die. There is only so much you can do. So I drowned them, but there has to be a quicker way. Maybe next time I'll try cutting them in half. Awww, ewww, terrible- poor worms. Or could I just throw them over the fence? Guess it depends on how mobile they are...
Funny enough, as I held one on my garden-gloved finger it pooped right in front of me! It was so weird, I wasn't sure which end of the worm was the head but I sure found out quickly enough. The backside opened up and the poop that came out was as wide as the worm. Gross! Its a good thing for those telltale signs of poop though, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to find them all and save my crop.

I also put some organic pesticide on but I think it was the wrong kind. BT is what works for catepillars. Although in the future I don't think I'll use either. Thinking about it, even though it is organic I still really don't know it's effects on the environment and who knows what is really affecting the bees. I decided just to keep looking for the poop, manually finding the offending worms, and at worst get some row covers.