Just to echo what others have said, in the past I covered them with floating row covers. This can be 100% effective *IF* you bury the edges so that none of them can crawl in. The trouble with FRC is that it's hard to bury it completely, then a few bugs find their way underneath and can cause damage without you even noticing. The other problem with FRC is that potato plants grow pretty large, so you need to use a wide cover with plenty of slack so that the plants can grow into it without being constrained. The past few years I just pick them by hand and accept some minimal level of damage. If you have a small to medium sized potato patch, hand picking is a fairly effective control strategy and of course it costs nothing and doesn't harm the environment! You'll miss a few, but that's OK. You'll still get plenty of nice spuds. -Diggity

i used them for a couple of years and no longer do. they worked pretty well, but in the end i felt they were more trouble than they were worth to me, and i did get some beetle damage. possibly they would work better for a more attentive gardener. i had to lift them up in order to hill the potatoes at least twice. maybe beetles got in that way. or maybe they got in where the cover was imperfectly meeting the soil line. maybe there's an easy way to keep the row cover in place along the bottom, but i didn't find one. i used plastic hoops made into arcs about 2 1/2' or 3' tall and found that the plants started bulging through when they got tall, poking holes in the covers. after a few years of this, i decided to forgo them and try to hand pick the beetles. i usually plant about 40' of row, or 40 plants. it would take 2 to 3 hours once or twice a season to check every leaf bottom (sounds much worse than it is) and squash all the eggs. i was amazed at how successful that is. and you get to see the plants, rather than the row covers. last year i did 3 things i'd never done before, and shockingly, i had NO beetles at all!! i don't know which factor it was, but this is what i did: 1) i planted the seed potatoes on june 15, (2 months later than usual) 2) i mulched the beds with straw (instead of hilling with soil) and mulched the surrounding paths with straw too. i read that they don't like straw. 3) i planted 4 horseradish plants, one at each corner of the patch. maybe by planting them late i missed the beetles' reproductive cycle. i don't know, but that's my best guess. that's my experience. i'm sure some people have had better luck with the row covers. good luck!

if you type "floating row covers for potatoes" in the search box above, the page's 3rd link down has the most recent discussion on this topic. some people have had success; i didn't like them much. if you can keep them well anchored to soil level, and tall and wide enough so that the growing stems don't poke holes in them, they might work well. in my area (5 ny) the beetles come out in early to mid june i think, and continue laying eggs for a few weeks. after i stopped using row covers i started scraping the eggs off the bottoms of the leaves, with excellent results. i usually plant 40 or more plants and it takes me a few hours at one sitting, then another hour or 2 a week or so later. i check every leaf, but it's not as daunting as it sounds. the eggs are bright orange and can be seen easily when you hold up a stem. good luck

I will say, again, that the Costata Romanesca zucchini that I started growing after MaryMd7 recommended it to me does not seem to be bothered by squash vine borers -- or rather, by the time the squash vine borers kill the zucchini, we are so sick of zucchini that I almost want to run out and say thank you to the squash vine borers. Costata Romanesca also tastes good. The stem juice does have some bizarre viscous properties, and the plant gets b-i-g, so it's not good for small gardens. Zucchetta rampicante/Tromboncino is a moschata squash, so it doesn't have any problems with squash vine borers at all, but, while it was extremely productive, neither Mr. Alfie nor I liked the flavor at all. PNBrown grows Costata Romanesca too, and he's in Massachusetts, so I know the variety works in Massachusetts -- although not necessarily your part of Massachusetts :-).