What is eating the Cauliflower?

This week is a sad week for everyone who is growing cauliflower. Tuesday Jim showed me one of his cauliflowers that had half of it eaten and lots of black on the rest of it. We puzzled over it but thought it was just a one time problem.

Unfortunately, no it wasn't. Weds I saw Denise and was telling her about the weird problem. We decided to go peek in at the heads on Jim's cauliflower plants. UH OH.....lots of damage. Luckily I had Jim's cell number so I called to tell him he was being eaten out of house and home and he'd might want to come sooner than later or he'd have nothing left.

 

This is what Jim's cauliflower head looked like when he harvested it.

All the black is dirt from the feet of the critter

  

Before I ran up to the garden today (Thursday 11-15), I called Amy at the Extension office to talk to her about the problem. The best we could figure out is that some kind of rodent (field mouse, chipmunk, rat) has been crawling in and eating the cauliflower. What do you know...this picture helps prove our hypothesis.

 

If you enlarge this picture  and look at the two parts of the leaves

next to Dalita's thumb and finger, you can see little scratch marks

Dalita was a great help holding the cauliflower leaves back and we decided to peek at Jim's as well. Double Dang....more damage....one of his perfect heads had been half eaten. We looked at Jim's remaining two and he had more eaten. Triple Dang.....

 

A perfect head.....at 12:38 pm on Nov. 15

 

We wandered around looking to see if anyone else had critter damage. Yep, anyone who has cauliflower has critter nibbles. And by tomorrow it might be more than nibbles. Luckily Mike arrived at the garden just as I was leaving so I could tell him that his perfect small head of cauliflower wasn't long for this world.

 

Since we don't know exactly what is eating the cauliflower it is hard to protect the heads besides just cutting them real small. The two options are:

 

  1) Make a 5 sided cage with hardware cloth to put over the cauliflower plant.  The frame can be made with wood and  then cover the 4 sides of the square and the the top with the hardware cloth. Secure it so nothing can sneak through where the pieces meet. Once you place the frame over the plant,  pin it securely to the ground to keep anything from squeezing through. This is somewhat impractical for us because it would squish all the plants around it and/or not even fit in the bed properly.

 

  2) Use powdered fox urine. I've never used it but Mike has at home.  Also, I don't know precisely what brand Mike uses either, but here is a link to learn more about powdered Fox Urine if you are interested.  And lastly I have no idea if it smells either but it is organic!

                        Powdered Fox Urine to Repel Wildlife Pests

 

Amy did say that just because we had trouble with wildlife critters eating cauliflower heads this fall, it doesn't mean we'll have problems in the future. Every season is different.

 

         Vicki