Cutworms
Smooth gray, brown or greenish caterpillars that live just under the soil and feed at night. They wrap around a seedling stem and chew it off at ground level, so you find the plant lying beside its own root in the morning.
Pest checklist
Four things to look for. If most of them match what you are holding, you are in the right place.
What gets rid of them
Gentlest option first. For most backyard cases the first one is enough, so try these in order and stop as soon as it works. If you do spray something, the product label tells you how — please read the notice further down.
1Dig them out
Scratch through the top inch or two of soil within a few inches of the cut stem, find the curled caterpillar, and destroy it.
Try this first2Collar the transplants
Push a cardboard tube, tin can with both ends out, or a strip of foil around each transplant stem so it sits an inch into the soil and a couple of inches above it.
cutworm collars seedling plant protectors3Keep bare ground around the bed
Clear weeds and old plant litter from a few feet around the planting a couple of weeks before you set plants out, since the moths lay eggs in that cover.
4Treat the soil surface at dusk
If you keep losing plants, apply a garden insecticide labeled for cutworms to the soil around the stems in the evening, when they come up to feed.
spinosad garden insect spray
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Which plants get cutworms
Every plant we cover that gets cutworms, grouped by type — tap any one to open its page. A note beside a plant came from that plant’s own entry, because the same pest can be a minor nuisance on one plant and a serious problem on another. Plenty of plants we do not cover get it too.
perennial1
biennial1
Plant families hit hardest
Related plants often share the same problems, so if one plant in a family has it, check the others. The largest group here is Brassicaceae, with 4 of the 13 affected plants.
- Brassicaceae4 plants
- Solanaceae3 plants
- Apiaceae2 plants
When to treat
Act the first morning you find a cut seedling, because one cutworm will keep working down the row night after night; dig around the nearest surviving plants that same day.
Timing only — the label is the law
This page tells you when to watch for cutworms and when treating is worth considering. It is not a recommendation to apply any particular product. Read and follow the product label before you spray — under federal law the label is the legal instruction, and using a pesticide against it is illegal.
- Check the pre-harvest interval. Every product that’s cleared for an edible crop sets a minimum number of days between spraying and picking. Find it on the label before you spray anything you intend to eat.
- Check the re-entry interval before you or anyone else works in the treated area again, and use the protective equipment the label names.
- Confirm the product is registered for your crop in your state. This page groups many different crops together, and a product legal on one of them is not legal on all of them — state registrations differ too. Your state pesticide agency or local extension office can confirm both.
- Rates and mixing instructions come from the label, never from us. We don’t publish them because they differ by product and formulation.
Other problems on the same plants
If a plant gets cutworms, these are the problems it most often gets as well, so they are worth checking for while you are out there. They tend to appear together; one does not cause another.