Take the time to learn that there is not a "cure all" for every pest at every stage of it's life cycle. Some won't work if it's going to rain. Some don't work well if it's too hot, etc. Pest management is complex, if you wish to use chemical products, do so responsibly which goes further than reading the label. If you want to learn, a good place to start is here: Integrated Pest Management This lecture is presented in two parts. Each part is 90-minutes in length. Recorded in Sacramento County in California's Sacramento Valley, this lecture is byMary Louise Flint, Ph.D., Director, IPM Education and Publications, UC Statewide IPM Project and Extension Entomologist & Cooperative Extension Specialist. Education: B.S. Plant Science, University of California, Davis Ph.D. Entomology, University of California, Berkeley Appointment: 100% Cooperative Extension Research Interests: Integrated pest management of landscape, agricultural and garden pests; biological control of arthropod pests; alternatives to pesticides; adoption of alternative practices by practitioners; innovative delivery of pest management information. Topics discussed in the Integrated Pest Management Lecture: * IPM references and resources * Preventing pest problems * Natural common enemies * Making less toxic pesticide choices * Controlling aphids, scales, caterpillars, coddling moths, tree borers, snails and slugs, and lawn insects. You can watch the programs now online: Just make sure you have Real Player installed or download it free. Integrated Pest Management Part1 90 minutes Integrated Pest Management Part 2 90 minutes You'll want to bookmark the following link to Professor Flint's Lab Research on: Controlling Pests in Gardens and Landscapes: Vegetables and Melons I promise you'll learn one or two things to put in your gardening bag of pest management arsenals. Here is a link that might be useful: Potato Tuberworm aka Colorado Potato Beetle (Phthorimaea operculella) Control

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 don't have a lot of plants so hand picking them for now seems to be working. I take my soon to be 6 year old daughter out with me, I search and she destroys. She gets a kick out of it and it gives her something to do and she is learning about bad bugs already! It really seems to have slowed the invasion down!

borderokie, Unfortunately for those of us who try to raise our gardens as pesticide-free as possible, the alternate methods that we employ instead of spraying pesticides are, indeed, extremely time-consuming. What I have found is that if I can manage to find the time to hand-pick and destroy the beetles when the outbreak first begins, then I will have little to no trouble with them after that. Thus, I might have spent a ridiculous amount of time over the course of a few days hand-picking and drowning the beetles, but I haven't found many since then--maybe 3 or 4. What I have noticed the last few days is that the spined soldier bugs have shown up and now are sitting on top of the potato leaves. They will provide CPB control for me for the remainder of the summer, so my work is done. An alternate method of doing this if your garden doesn't have a naturally-occurring population of spined soldier bugs is to buy some from an insectary and release them. We also have two turtles crawling around in the garden who like to eat CPBs when they can find them, but the turtles are more effective when the plants are smaller and the beetles are down low within their reach. With all the recent rainfall, the potato plants are very tall now and the turtles cannot reach the bugs that are higher up on the plants. For a long time, we could use Colorado Potato Beater's old formulation (and other products with the same active ingredient), which at the time contained a bioinsecticide called Bacillus thuringiensis 'san diego' or 'tenibrionsis'. Unfortunately, those products have become harder to find. Bonide, which makes and sells Colorado Potato Beater changed their product's formulation from the Bt strains to Spinosad. I assume they did this because repeated spraying of the Bt product was leading to Bt-resistant CPBs. History has shown that CPBs develop resistance to or tolerance of commonly-used insecticides so you have to rotate the products you use in order to prevent that from occurring, or to at least slow it down. You still might be able to find one of the Bt products that target CPBs at a farm store or someplace with a great selection of organic pesticides, but all the stores here near me merely carry Bonide's spinosad product. Be sure you find the particular strain of Bt that targets CPBs, because there are other strains available that target other insects, like Bt 'kurstaki' for caterpillars or Bt 'israelensis' for mosquito larvaw. Pyrethrin sprays often work on CPBs too, but they are more toxic to other life forms and I don't want to use them in my garden, especially the formulations that contain PBO. We have cats that spend a lot of their time in the garden with me and pyrethrins can cause nervous system disorders in cats, so I don't use pyrethrins often, and generally only as a last resort. Sometimes I'll spray Take-down Spray directly on a pest, like blister beetles, in the garden, but not when the cats are in the garden with me, and never on a plant the cats adore like catmint, catnip or cat grass. Larry, You could try the net and see if it works. CPBs are smart and do seem to 'dive' off the plants when they see us reaching for them. To get around that, i hold the bowl of soapy water under the leaf with my left hand and then reach for the CPB with my right hand. If the CPB sees my hand approaching and attempts to jump or fall off the leave to get away, it falls right into the bowl of soapy water. Isn't that helpful? I appreciate that those CPBs put themselves right into the bowl of soapy water for me. Dawn