White butterfly pest or not?

[diane1]

in my garden i have found a lot of catepillers and i have alot of white butterflies. My nasturtiums as always covered in caterpillars munching away which makes me thinks these lovely butterflies are pests. does anyone know?

[mikewall01]

If your plants are being damaged then you can safely say that they are pests. It is not the butterflies that are doing the damage, but the caterpillars that will later become butterflies.
You refer to white butterflies. These will be either Large Whites or Small Whites, which are difficult to tell apart for the untrained eye. We commonly call both by the single name Cabbage White. This because they will always lay their eggs on their favourite food supply which is cabbages and all related plants along with nasturtiums and a few others. There is normally three flights of butterfly each year, These are May-June, July-September and again in October. To rid your plants of this menace you have two options. Firstly you can hand pick all the eggs or the caterpillars from the plants or, secondly you could spray with an insecticide when you first see signs of eggs below the leaves.

[sddsddean]

We gave up growing Nasturtiums for exactly this reason.

[diane1]

thanks everyone. Today the children and I had a mamoth catipillar picking day almost a whole magarine tub! we then had the problem of what to do with them, killing them was out so we got in the car drove to a near by woods and set them free, this pleased the children, i had an after thought, they don't have a homing instinct do they. Of course i mean the catipillars not the children!

[diane1]

oops I mean catEpillar don't I.

[mikewall01]

No, you actually mean caterpillar but don't let it worry you.
You'll be able to keep your children happy for a while yet because there's probably a lot more where they (the caterpillars) came from.
Happy hunting.

[diane1]

opps again, caterpillar, thanks again everyone