Under attack

It started within two days. A few eggs of a few owlet moths broke and gave birth to a group of hungry caterpillars. Those little beasts spend the day at the bottom of the trunk where they are basically invisible. At night they crawl up the stem over to the buds. Fresh and crispy buds, their favorite meal. They eat one after the other. And when they are done they just move on to the next vine. The result look like this:

Damaged bud

And there is not a lot you can do about this. You can either wait and hope that the buds break asap as the caterpillars only like bugs, not leaves. Or you can wait for the night when those bloody caterpillars think it’s save for them to crawl up.

This is what we did. The Night’s Watch went for the beasts in our precious Silvaner vineyard for three hours and hunted down about 50 enemies.

Caterpillar eating young vines

It was actually a beautiful night to walk around in the vineyard. And there is so much to see. Like this little buddy:

Vineyard urchin

And loads of spiders of course.

Spider

Tonight we’ll be hunting again (if it doesn’t rain) and I hope we’ll have caught the majority of the caterpillars. Next fear on the horizon: frost.

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