Culling the Kale Killers

Are your kale and other brassicas being destroyed by pests? Are your organic solutions not working? Well there's better solutions - because "organic" is a state of mind, Read on!

Whether you like it in salads, shakes or stir-fries, kale is a worthwhile crop to have in the garden. It's combination of being relatively easy to grow, tasty, healthy, and being a "cut and come again" crop have made it very popular among gardeners, but sometimes it becomes painfully obvious that it's not just gardeners who like these high-value greens.

Years ago, when I kept a garden in the suburbs, I grew kale every year (long before it was a health fad, by the way) with no issues. The technique was simple: put the seeds in the ground in April, move the mulch around the stems when they are about four inches high, then beginning sometime in late June, enjoy it until late November. When I moved to my current location, I tried continuing with this routine, but for whatever reason, I had serious problems with pests that like kale and other brassicas like kohlrabi, collards, cabbage, broccoli and radishes. In this article, I will discuss my evolution with "organically approved" approaches to pests that plague brassicas.

Slugs and snails

For slugs and snails, I first looked to the most benign options suggested by many organic gardening sources - such as copper wire barriers, cardboard shelters, and beer traps.

The reasoning behind copper is that it creates a chemical reaction that slugs do not like, so if you wrap copper wire around your plant, the slugs will leave it alone due to a sensation that they get when they cross the cardboard. The cardboard shelter idea suggests that if you put pieces of cardboard down between your rows, the slugs will hide there when the sun comes out, and you can just turn over the cardboard and squish them. The beer trap is a bowl of beer set into the soil so that the rim of the bowl is at ground level. The slugs wander in, drawn to the smell, and then they get totally wasted and drown.