I tend to have quite a bit of trouble with cutworms in the spring; they seem to move indiscriminately down rows, chomping through plant stems.
Has anyone been able to breed resistance to cutworms into their landraces, to the point where they aren’t much of a problem anymore?
Do the cutworms eat all of the weeds? Or only vegetables?
The cutworms do eat weeds—I was actually just out scouting my unplanted beds for cutworm activity to see how bad it was this year. By sifting through the soil around any weeds that looked “sad” or nibbled, I was able to find quite a few of them. They seem to particularly like the volunteer sunflowers.
Of course, since there are always more weeds, and since the crops are in a defined pattern, cutworm damage on the crops is more noticeable. I wouldn’t probably notice even if there were 50% less weeds due to cutworm damage.
In outbreak years here, I’ve seen them consume almost all the plants in some beds, despite handpicking every morning and replanting several times.
As I move away from transplanting toward direct sowing, I’m hoping that the damage will become more manageable, since there will be more seedling plants in a given area. I’m also considering moving more of my planting to midsummer and letting all the biennials behave as biennials—that way, the small young cutworms in the spring would be munching on large, established plants that could resist the damage.
As an interesting note for those who don’t know, cutworms along the Front Range of Colorado turn into Miller Moths that migrate up into the mountains for the summer–and there, they become an important food source for grizzly bears! They migrate back down in the autumn to lay eggs.
Weighing in as I feel enough time has passed for the better informed to answer.
As a newcomer to plant breeding I can’t speak directly to this. But in line with your thought of having a larger number of mature plants when cutworm season starts, I suspect there isn’t a vertical here, and that you’re talking about selecting for general plant vigor/horizontal resistance.
I am of the fallible opinion, though not informed by decades of experience, that system design may be as important as good landrace gardening practices in this specific case.
A huge piece of that, which would seem to me to dovetail perfectly with landrace gardening, is not falling into the trap of active pest management. If you actively manage pests, it seems to me you’re not only depriving your plants of important growth experiences in their effective adaptation to your conditions, you’re also disincentivizing balancing predation in your food system and putting the brakes on its ability to regulate itself. That’s without even talking about the negative effects of killing that are independent of a food-growing context.
There’s a natural aquaculture farm in Spain mentioned in Dan Barber’s The Third Plate. As it is fully integrated with a natural ecosystem, the farm routinely loses 20% of their fish to predation, mainly flamingos. While breeding the fish to better resist predation isn’t out of the question, making sure that the food system is well designed (including the business it supplies) seems likely to be lower-hanging fruit.
If you let your plants and ecosystem predators figure it out with pests as their friends and mentors I think you’re probably likely to have a better time and provide richer ground for local adaptation.
Whatever you decide to do, even in the event that good breeding and growing habits can’t get rid of the problem, I couldn’t recommend any strategy of direct pest management.
Yes, I intend to avoid active cutworm management going forward (though I’ll still remove cutworms if I happen to find one). This year, I used cutworm collars on some plants where my focus is on increasing seed stock and making initial crosses, but in the future, I hope to avoid doing that.
That is a great story! Wow, it’s so surprising and also hopeful!
I am finding, more and more, that “the more you share, the more you will have” is true in all situations, on all levels, as long as most people (or species) are doing it.
It’s the best way to live.
