Saturday, October 1st in the Lewis Ginter Community Kitchen Garden started out like many others since Hurricane Irene: Gloomy and wet. Those conditions didn’t deter eight volunteers from showing up ready to work. Normally we wouldn’t want a lot of foot traffic in the garden when it’s wet, but at this stage the planting beds are easily accessible from well-mulched pathways.

The large number of volunteers was perfect for our primary task of the day – manual intervention to control cabbage worms. Our experiment with row covers produced a completely surprising, antithetical observation: The covered plants had many more worms than the uncovered plants. Theories? (Uncovered plants allowed predators to get to the worms; the cool nights drove the worms under the row covers to the warmer environment…?)