CHALLENGE BRASSICA!

Garden Organic’s Dr Anton Rosenfeld says brassicas are great and offers advice on coping with their challenges

- Dr Anton Rosenfeld

Gardeners have a love-hate relationship with brassicas. As a family of plants, there’s no doubt they provide one of the widest arrays of tasty vegetables. They include not only the traditional mainstays such as cabbages, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower but also more adventurous vegetables such as Romanesco, komatsuna, tatsoi and mibuna. Unfortunately, this seems to go hand-in-hand with a long list of pests, diseases and disorders!

This doesn’t mean that you must turn to sprays and toxic chemicals to grow brassicas however. I’ve seen many prize-worthy plants on organic farms and gardens. It just requires some forethought and planning.

Organic growing is all about making your growing space more resilient to pests and diseases, so if you have an idea of what your plants could possibly succumb to, you can take measures to prevent it happening in the first place. Here are some of the afflictions that can affect brassicas and how to avoid them.

CATERPILLARS

There are three main types that attack brassicas. These are the small cabbage white, the large cabbage white and the cabbage moth. The large cabbage white first appears as clusters of yellow eggs on both sides of the leaves. These hatch into lime green and black caterpillars, which have the advantage of being pretty conspicuous. The small cabbage white does a better job of hiding, with small white eggs laid singly underneath the leaves, and the colour of the caterpillar blends in well with the leaf, so they can look like a piece of stem. The cabbage moth has small white spherical eggs laid in clusters on either surface which hatch out into dull brown or green caterpillars.