I hate you, pretty white butterfly!

Some people think this beautiful white butterfly is a lovely addition to their garden.  When I noticed it in my very first winter vegetable garden years ago, I thought, "Oh how wonderful.  My garden is so healthy, it's attracting all these fabulous butterflies."  When I looked across my garden full of cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, beets, carrots, turnips, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and a bunch of other things, there seemed to be at least a hundred of them, fluttering merrily above it all.  I admired them for a few minutes, then bent over and got back to work.  It wasn't until a couple of weeks later that their beauty turned deadly.  Hundreds of little green caterpillars were everywhere eating everything down to nubbins.  Well, not everything.  But just about everything.

When I realized that the culprit was this pretty white butterfly, properly called the Cabbage Moth, it was game on.  Over the years we have dealt with them by: 1. hand-rubbing out the worms as we hunt them among the veggies, 2. catching them with a butterfly net,  3. slapping them with our bare hands (much to the horror of the occasional child in the garden),  4. covering their favorite delicacies with floating row cover,  5. spraying with organic-approved Bt (bacillus thuringiensis), swatting them with a tennis racket, or 7. ignoring them.

No matter how much I want it to, ignoring them is just not helpful.  I don't recommend ignoring them.  As Glenn Close said in Fatal Attraction, "I will NOT be ignored!"