We've noticed that when we allow winter weeds to take hold in the fall and wait until late winter to till that the cutworms are worse. One year when we did that we lost a lot of onions and peas and broccoli. A winter cover crop also attracts cutworms. (AND deer AND rabbits,) so we don't plant one any more. DH tills the garden in fall as soon as we get it cleaned up after a killing frost and then again in February for the spring planting. The best thing we have to counter rabbits is a couple rabbit killing dogs. Last year they got almost a dozen young ones and one mature one. Go dogs.

Geez - if it's not the gophers, it's the cutworms!!

I'm sure you've done some google searches, but here's one I found that suggest a generous sprinkling of Epson salt, then spray with a mix of dawn dishsoap and water. It's supposed to kill them. That would maybe be something you have on hand. Another one was cornmeal...but ehhhhh....I dunno 'bout that one.

Surely Dawn will toodle by and remind us of some organic ways....

Here is a link that might be useful: Suggestions to be rid of cutworms

If you think my cutworm rant is bad, wait till I start in on gophers! Talk about Caddyshack!
I'll look into the epsom salts and dawn thing.
The cornmeal, if it works would also act as a weed retardant.

Hi outdoorsman,

I'm unable to find the post, right now, but I have a serious problem with army worms and cutworms. The army worms.. gah! They crawl onto the plants.

Anyway, Dawn suggested Sluggo Plus. Not regular Sluggo, but the "Plus". The key ingredient is Spinosad. I couldn't find Sluggo Plus locally, but I found a bottle of Spinosad at Atwoods.

It is organic, too. Probably kills the poor good beetle grubs, but I don't know what else to do. There are too many in my newly uncovered grounds. What Paula suggests about over-wintering weeds, makes sense. That's where I find them - on the roots of weeds.

Dawn suggests its application as directed and states it works real well. In my case, I have a pill bug problem, too, because I'm drastically amending soil drawing them in. Should work for those as well.

bon

Okay, here Dawn goes into detail of this product and its effectiveness.

"When to use SuggoPlus?"

CUTWORMS: These usually are not much of a problem in my garden. They were really bad a few years ago and ate everything in sight, probably in the late March-late April time frame. That year I sprayed the entire garden with Thuricide, which is an organic product that contains Bt 'kurstaki' which targets only caterpillars. I hated using it because it can harm the butterflies and moths I love seeing flying around the flowers, but it saved the garden from total destruction at the hands of the cutworms, climbing cutworms and army worms.

I usually try to get rid of the cutworms before I plant, generally by rototilling in January, especially on a nice warm day that is going to be followed immediately by a freezing cold night. You can kill a lot of soil-dwelling pests by tilling the soil and bringing them up to the surface where they die. Either the birds find them quickly after you leave the garden and the birds devour them, or they are exposed to colder temperatures and freeze.

When I am transplanting seedlings into the ground, I usually put a stick (I use toothpicks for most plants, or bamboo skewers for larger ones, but you could even use twigs) on either side of the seedling, putting half of it below ground and half above. It serves the same purpose as wrapping the stems with something to serve as a cutworm collar, but is quicker and easier. The cutworms have to wrap themselves completely around the stem to cut all the way through it, and the toothpicks prevent that. One toothpick alone might work, but I always use two in the years when I use them at all.

RABBITS: Fencing is all that has worked for me. Because we have large, predatory wildlife that could kill our dogs, they are sleeping soundly inside at night while the cottontails play. We do have a cat who will kill a rabbit and eat it, sharing it with her three children, if she finds one outside during the daylight hours. Then she proudly brings us the head of the rabbit, leaving it on the Welcome mat at the front door. She was feral before we found her, tamed her and adopted her and her kittens and she clearly was a good hunter because she kept them all well-fed and alive.

In the absence of killer cats and dogs, I prefer fencing to any other method. I like rabbits, and love watching the cottontails hopping all over at night....but that is because they are fenced out of all the veggie garden spots. I just use fencing to exclude them from places I don't want them.

You also can train them to come to a specific place to eat each night. I put out henscratch by the driveway for them daily around twilight year-round, and they come there, eat it, and generally leave without even attempting to get into the garden. Another way to draw them away from your plantings is to plant something they really like as a trap crop to draw them away from the garden. In the fall, I usually sow a deer food plot seed mix out behind the barn, and the deer generally ignore it, but the rabbits love the clover in it and will eat that all winter, or until it all has been devoured down to the ground, whichever comes first.

You can try sprinkling human hair or blood meal around the plants you want to protect from rabbits. It generally will repel some, but not all, of them.

I have garlic growing in a raised bed by my garden shed and that area is not fenced. To keep the rabbits out of it, we put up a low tunnel made of PVC hoops covered with chicken wire and that keeps the rabbits out of the garlic. I don't even know if they'd bother it, but I wasn't going to take any chances with it.

Before we finally got the garden fence 100% rabbit proof, they usually would eat mostly just bean plants and pea plants when they got into my garden.

I also learned long ago (before we finally, through lots of trial and error, got the fence 100% rabbit-proof, skunk-proof and deer-proof) to plant extra plants of everything we grew so that if the wild things got some of the plants, we still had plenty left for us. We live way out in the sticks, and there isn't a wild thing here that I haven't had in or around my garden at some point....including wild things I never actually thought we'd see here. For the record, bobcats appear to enjoy catnip as much as house cats do....and bobcats kill rabbits. How's that for a little natural pest control?

I've never worried too much about the Thuricide. It has a short affective life once applied. I always spray late in the evening. Hopefully that reduces exposure to beneficial critters.
Tomatoes and peppers go in late enough that with minimal effort, cutworms are normally not a problem. I normally set a gallon can around them and them apply a light dusting of D-Earth.
I like the blood meal idea. Duel benefit, timed right.
This year most of my onions are in my main garden that only needs a little work to finish making it rabbit proof and deer resistant. The rest will be going into an experimental raised bed. Location to be determined in the next few hours. More than likely, I'll put chicken wire around the raised bed, once it's in place.