Troy met an interesting caterpillar a few days ago. He met it the hard way while trying to remove some “volunteer” honeyvine milkweed that was slowly engulfing one side of our front porch. Unbeknownst to him, the invasive vine was the preferred feeding spot for several milkweed tussock moth caterpillars. It just so happens that the hairs of these caterpillars can be painful and irritating to the skin – it’s their defense mechanism. Lesson learned – wear thick gloves when working in this part of the yard.
My apologies for the less than stellar cell phone photo, it was all I had available at the moment.
As you may (or may not) know, we prefer not to use pesticides; however, in this instance we were wondering if we should make an exception as to prevent further stinging caterpillar hair incidents. I decided to do a little research first to see if there was something else we could try before breaking out the chemicals…
While doing a little online sleuthing, I discovered that these beautiful little caterpillars only feed on milkweed. So that means that we do not have to worry about them taking over our property as we don’t actually grow milkweed. This vine was a volunteer plant from a seed that probably blew into our yard on a breeze one day and made itself at home.
So if I’m thinking about this correctly – if we eradicate the milkweed vine there will be no more hairy but beautiful caterpillars in our yard. But wait, there’s more to the story…
I also read that much like the Very Hungry Caterpillar in the Eric Carle book, these little guys will eat, and eat, and eat some more. So maybe in the process of all that eating, they will mostly eradicate the volunteer milkweed vine on our behalf? Even if they don’t fully eradicate it, maybe they will manage to mostly remove what is left of the vine? Troy made pretty good headway before he got stung. There’s only a small bit of vegetation left for them to munch on at this point.
After giving it some thought, we have decided to leave things alone and let nature run its course, while we keep watch on the situation.
If ANY seed pods manage to pop up on this vine before the caterpillars leave the buffet, they will be need to be removed ASAP to prevent further spread of the vine in our yard.
If there are any remnants of the vine left over after these little guys are stuffed full and all cocooned up for the winter, we will remove it by hand and hope that it doesn’t return.
If the vine decides to persist next spring in an attempt to engulf our porch (this is the most likely outcome as I’ve read that it’s a tough plant to completely eradicate), we will remove it by hand as often as necessary and try to stay ahead of the problem before the moths return to lay eggs that hatch into hairy caterpillars and we return right back to where we are at the moment.
Would it be easier to just whip out a little pesticide and herbicide to knock out the problem right now? Maybe. But that’s not our jam. We try to live in harmony with nature. There is a seasonality to most pests and we have learned that sometimes you just have to live with the issue for a little while and then things resolve on their own. Except for voles…I might be waving the white flag of surrender on that issue because I just can’t seem to win that battle. For now, we just watch and wait – and wear gloves!