Cutworms don't care

At the suggestion of an old dude, I wrapped straws around the base of my plants to keep cutworms from getting to them. I think his exact quote was "the straws are too slick for the little  fellers to climb." Well now i'm pretty sure once I left his house he laughed his ass off at the thought of me painstakingly cutting little pieces of drinking straws and hunching over to wrap them around the stalks of my young veggies. Either he was full of crap or I have a strain of extraordinary caterpillars at my house. I'm thinking the first option. In any event, as you can see the little turd crawled right up the straw and knocked over one of my tomatillos. When I caught him, he was 50% on the straw, 50% on the plant, and 100% jackass. I of course slammed him into the patio, but not until the damage was done.

Enough of the wives tales and old farmer remedies, I'm breaking out the big guns. My wife picked up this Thuricide last year to help with a squash borer problem we had and the stuff worked great. What I like about this product is that it's a protein that affects caterpillar digestion rather than an insecticide. Who knows, exposure to this could be worse but it sounds good anyway. At least if I die slowly I'll do so knowing that the cutworms I hate so much join in my fate. The only downside to this is that it takes 3 days to kill the bastards off, so hopefully destruction is minimal for the next few nights.

Well, Thuricide certainly didn't stop them the first night. I found several caterpillars out there. Look at these mugshots.