Gooseberry Sawfly - The Accidental Smallholder

Posted: Thursday 22 April, 2004

by Dan at 8:42am in Growing 1 comment Comments closed

The little bastards are back, but this year I've caught them early and fully intend to destroy them. This morning the first evidence of the annual gooseberry sawfly invasion was found - a few leaves low on the larger of our two bushes had the tell-tale dotted lines of eggs running along their veins, and about a dozen leaves were swiss-cheese holey, meaning some of the eggs had hatched and the baby caterpillars were already munching their way to adulthood.

They are a voracious pest, and, as I can testify from a couple of years ago, can defoliate an entire bush overnight if left to their own devices. Luckily our bushes seem to be pretty hardy and admirably withstand the best efforts of the sawfly to do them in. In previous years I haven't managed to catch them early, and control has been impossible, with damage limitation the only hope.

This consisted of picking off the mature caterpillars and feeding them to the hens, and a liberal application of derris powder. This year though I've picked off all the infested leaves I could find, and will exercise daily vigilance during the next few weeks to try to stop them getting a grip. It's easy to be lulled into a false sense of security - they can have 4 or 5 hatchings a season, so I may have won this battle but the war has hardly begun.