Pest Technician Talks Cutting Cutworms Off at the Pass

Cutworm. Brad Smith / Flickr
Cutworm. Brad Smith / Flickr

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

Cutworms are on the attack, and they’re out for your broccoli, collard greens, and cabbage – but they eat most everything.

Janice Chumley, Integrated Pest Management Technician with Kenai Peninsula District Office of the Cooperative Extension, will be in Kodiak Thursday through Saturday to do site visits and answer any questions local gardeners may have – including about cutworms.

She says these pests turn into moths in the fall, but they keep busy in their summer worm form by feasting on gardeners’ crops.

“The name pretty much says it all. It’s a fairly large caterpillar-looking thing that when you come out in the morning, you’ll find your plants just laying over, and they have been literally chewed off, or you can find them crawling up and chewing off some of the leaves. They’re the larval stage of a noctuid moth, and noctuid simply means night flying.”

So, what does one do about these creepy crawlies and their appetite?

“They go horizontal in the soil, so they’re going across the soil, so if you have a root collar, say half of a coffee can that you have pushed down into the soil and planted through the top of that, they run into that barrier so that they can’t get past it. That’s one of the things you can do. Hand picking is always another if the population is low enough.”

Chumley says she’ll speak to gardeners in Kodiak about combatting pests as part of the Cooperative Extension’s Alaska Agriculture Pest Project. It’s a three year endeavor where IPM technicians visit farms, ranches, and greenhouses and introduce people to integrated pest management.

“For Kodiak, I have a number of people that have contacted me, and I will be going out to their locations and hopefully going over some IPM ideas to help them reduce their pest pressure, be aware of any new pests that might be showing up and increase their production.”

Chumley says most of her site visits in Kodiak will be to greenhouses where growers are cultivating vegetables and fighting against these tiny, living obstacles called pests.

Besides cutworms, Chumley says Kodiak’s warm winters have also brought out root maggots, slugs, and spruce aphids in full force. You can tune into KMXT’s Talk of the Rock on Tuesday to hear more about those pests and what to do about them. That’ll be at 12:30 p.m. right after KMXT’s midday report.

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