
I plucked them off. They are now residing in a jar with greens from turnips and from a nearby radish, which wasn't infested with the caterpillars. I'm setting it up as a preschool science experiment. Do you think the caterpillars will selectively eat the turnip greens in the jar? Or had they just not noticed my lovely radishes? Oh! Gotta add the radish and baby turnip to the yield totals!
Ok, my science mind is starved by motherhood. I got out some old equations to work on the caterpillar density. I know that 16 caterpillars might not sound that remarkable to you, but they were found in my little container garden. One pot of lonely turnips, the pot being about 12 inches in diameter. Feel free to check my math... That is a radius of 6 inches. The surface area of the pot is pi*r*r = 113.1 square inches. That's 0.15 caterpillars per square inch, or 20.4 caterpillars per square foot. Gosh, if I had an acre of turnips, they'd have 887,397 caterpillars on them! That feels like a caterpillar plague of Biblical proportions in my little pot!
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