Hi Yannick, we don’t spray it very often at all, BT degrades in sunlight and heat so if you spray a week before you harvest, all traces of the BT will likely be gone by then.

Hi TC, unfortunately since most beneficial nematodes are soil dwelling, they won’t offer much defense against cabbage moths and their caterpillars since the eggs are laid on the plant itself where the caterpillar remains until it pupates and turns into a cabbage moth. Hope that helps and good luck!

Hi Ilana, have you found the caterpillars on your plants? There are some tell-tale signs of cabbage worms so I would just try and verify that the issue is indeed cabbage worms, once you do that, you can try and hand pick the caterpillars off your plants if you can see them, also spraying the plants with BT will help get rid of the caterpillars and your plants should start to rebound. As far as removing the lower cabbage leaves, if the plants are already sizable, it isn’t an issue to remove some of the lower leaves, you just don’t want to do so on smaller plants. Hope that helps and good luck!

Thanks, much, Aaron! I guess there is just no magic solultion. Such is life — trial and error.
Please take good care of yourselves and all your 2 and 4-leggeds as well.
Best wishes,
Cara

Hi Cara, thank you so much for following along through the years and we are so grateful for your support! In regards to comments in older posts, thankfully new comments, no matter what article they are in, show up front and center for us. In regards to your question, yes, measuring out the insect netting can be a real pain and it’s something we struggle with as well!

For our 4 foot wide beds, we use this 6.5 foot wide insect netting which seems to be the right width to fit over our super hoops with base extenders. We essentially just lay the netting over the edge of the bed with hoops installed and makes sure we have enough slack on one end, we then unroll or unfold the netting over the bed until we reach the other side, once we have the right amount of slack on that end, we then cut the insect netting. You can do this on your own if you use clips to hold down the one end on the fabric on bed while you unfold the netting to the other side.

We have two raised beds that are 3 feet wide and we use the same width insect netting, it just has a little more fabric hanging over the ends. Now if you have raised beds in other shapes than squares or rectangles, I can see you would have an issue cutting the fabric correctly and I am not sure I have any suggestions for those unfortunately. Yet, I would think trying to secure one section of netting at a time to your bed while you roll out the rest will help you have an idea of where to cut, just be sure your hoops are installed on the beds while you do it. Hope that helps and reach out if you have any other questions, good luck!