Two Feet in the Dirt

It’s only mid-April, but the weather is definitely feeling like summer. On Tuesday, our home thermometer registered 90 degrees outside! I won’t deny that weather like this is a welcome relief after winter, but it’s always kind of a bummer at this point of the season when the plants love cooler, wetter conditions. It’s tempting to think that this is it and summer is here to stay, but I’m betting we’ve still got some cool, rainy weather in store for us before April and May are done. 

Despite the dry weather, I’m suspecting that there may be slugs going to work in the garden. Last week I mentioned how the kale was getting chomped and I suspected it might be cutworms. After keeping an eye on the plants for a few days, I noticed that I wasn’t seeing the same damage on cabbage plants that I had left uncovered, whereas the kale had been fully under row cover. Although it protects crops from many pests, row cover can actual provide a nice little moist habitat for slugs to live in. However, the type of damage I am seeing on the leaves just isn’t in line with what slug damage usually looks like.

Damage from pests like cutworms and cabbage worms looks like clean-edged bites out of the leaves. The leaf in this post’s picture is a good example. Slugs, on the other hand, have a different mechanism altogether for eating. Their tongue is rough (think nail file) and they use it to scrape along the leaf as they eat, leaving what is sometimes referred to as a window-pane effect where layers of the leaf are removed, but not the entire thing.

This often looks like a thin whitish “window” amongst an otherwise green leaf or like a hole all the way through the leaf but with ragged edges. (Check out these pictures- sorry for the blurriness!)

The damage I’m seeing looks much more like cutworm damage than slug damage, but the fact that only the plants under row cover were getting eaten makes me wonder. As a result, I’m pulling off the row cover for a little bit to see if that makes a difference. My main reason for using row cover was to prevent flea beetle damage and I think we’re safe from that for a little bit yet, so once again, I’m just keeping my fingers crossed!