Do you know your common caterpillars? They come in such an array of colours, shapes and textures and it’s their time now and through early summer to get munching through your precious veg seedlings and young plants in preparation to pupate!
Dot Moth Caterpillar: Jennie Smith (rspb-images.com)
Try not to reach immediately for the pest control spray, there are lots of things we gardeners can try to protect our precious plants like making a weak dilution of vinegar to spray, or by boiling garlic bulbs in water to make a garlic spray; this is reputed to keep slugs off plants too.
Keep encouraging the birds into the garden or close to vulnerable plants by putting seed down, birds love to eat caterpillars and planting strong fragrant plants such as sage, peppermint and lavender is said to repel caterpillars. I suppose we just don’t know if these ideas work until we give them a try but one of the most effective, wildlife friendly methods is to simply pick caterpillars off plants by hand and move them elsewhere.
You could even grow some plants specifically for caterpillars so you’ve got somewhere to move them to straight away, they particularly like foxgloves, birdsfoot trefoil, ivy, holly, thyme, sweet woodrough, hawthorns, thistles, dog rose, sweet woodrough, and nasturtiums. You can also just leave a patch of long grass to grow and allow the weeds to flourish, caterpillars also particularly like to eat dandelion, nettles, knapweed and dock …and when they’ve munched their way through what you’ve provided ... you could also leave some piles of leaf litter in a quiet undisturbed area for them to hide in to pupate.
Wildlife Insight state some interesting facts about the pupa stage of the lifecycle:
‘Butterflies and many species of moth don’t spin cocoons but instead pupate inside a single hairless pupal casing. These pupae may be formed in a wide variety of places including amongst leaf litter, in the soil, inside the stems of plants, on the trunks of trees and even on man made structures such as walls of houses. The word chrysalis is another name for a pupa and it comes from the Greek for gold.
This refers to the golden brown colour of some pupae. Although, many of these will darken with age as the moth or butterfly develops inside. Chrysalis is more often used to refer to the pupation life stage of a butterfly and pupa for that of a moth.’
Interestingly, when you do see a caterpillar it is likely to be a moth caterpillar as there are only 59 species of UK butterfly and approximately 2500 species of UK moth!
The Wildlife Trust have some information on how to identify caterpillars and Country Life features some great photos in their article on common caterpillars.
Caterpillars don’t often reflect the colours of their later winged form, for example the stunning coloured Peacock butterfly caterpillar is black, the Large Blue butterfly caterpillar is pink, the striking red and black Cinnabar moth caterpillar is striped black and yellow and the stunning pink and green Elephant Hawkmoth caterpillar is brown, … so there aren’t really any visual clues, it’s about knowing what each caterpillar is, and what it likes to eat!
Butterfly Conservation offers an overview of caterpillars in this online brief guide leaflet but if you’d like to have some handy printed information at home, you might like a book like this pocket guide on butterflies and moths and there are id charts and more books from the Natural History Book Service.
Hopefully you'll discover some beautiful caterpillars this bank-holiday weekend out in the countryside or in your garden chomping through some leaves that aren't too precious to you!
The Flatford Wildlife Garden is now open every day until October from 10.30am – 4.30pm. Entrance to the garden is free and well-behaved dogs on leads are welcome. Car parking is £5 at the Flatford National Trust car park and this gives you access to the stunning countryside walks around Dedham Vale in Constable Country.