If you’re growing any brassicas then you need to keep a good eye out for butterfly eggs and caterpillars. When I planted our kale and purple sprouting broccoli out, I covered them in fleece, really as a way to keep the pigeons off them so that the plants could get properly established. One windy day some of the fleece blew off, and the plants underneath had been decimated. I was cursing the pigeons as I walked over, but on closer inspection I discovered lots and lots of caterpillars. Unfortunately, I hadn’t checked the plants for butterfly eggs before planting them out! Lesson learned. Thankfully, most plants weren’t too badly damaged and I dutifully plucked off every caterpillar I could see (lucky hens!). One of the caterpillars felt so safe and comfortable that it had turned itself into a chrysalis!

I found some old fruit cage netting in the shed, and quickly cobbled together some sort of net for the plants. It’s not butterfly netting so some of them do craftily fly through, but it’s keeping most of them away. If your brassicas are not safely tucked away under fine netting then it’s worth looking at the underside of the leaves as often as you can and removing any eggs and caterpillars that you find. Those large whites really do deserve to be called cabbage whites!