With reference to Colorado beetles, in my experience the best approach is to scout the plants for beetles every two or three days and squish them. Start early because the adults emerge first and they're not too bad, but they produce lots of young which do the worst damage. I don't use a pesticide because the beetles are cleverer than I am; potatoes and their predecessor species have been developing pesticides for, say, 500,000 years. The beetles have overcome these pesticides one by one in a sort of arms race. Where potatoes are grown in bulk, including parts of Michigan, Colorado beetles have overcome every pesticide tried on them; the more they are challenged, the more they develop resistance. It's not surprising that the beetles can overcome artificial pesticides developed these last 50 years. So I don't bother with pesticides and I squish 'em. For more species of insect pests, the most useful are the umpteen species of minute wasps, ranging from 1/10 inch to 1/50 inch long. You never see them but they do great work parasitizing pest insect eggs and larvae. The best way to encourage them is to grow the small-flower plants they like most. #1 is boneset, #2 is sweet alyssum, and somewhere in the top ten is Riddell's goldenrod. This is a slow solution. Similarly, doing ones best not to harm those black ground beetles is the slow-but-sure answer to slugs. Flee beetles on eggplant and brassicas, however, can only be stopped by using row covers on immature plants, which doesn't get rid of the beetles of course. So my advice is to think long term and hold off on the pesticides which, after all, kill as many beneficial insects as they do pests. Regards, Peter.

Start by contacting you counties office of the Alabama Cooperative Extension service (supported by Alabama A & M and Auburn Universities) about having a good, reliable soil test to find out the pH of that soil and the amounts of the major nutrients in that soil. You might also want to use these simple soil tests, 1) Structure. From that soil sample put enough of the rest to make a 4 inch level in a clear 1 quart jar, with a tight fitting lid. Fill that jar with water and replace the lid, tightly. Shake the jar vigorously and then let it stand for 24 hours. Your soil will settle out according to soil particle size and weight. A good loam will have about 1-3/4 inch (about 45%) of sand on the bottom. about 1 inch (about 25%) of silt next, about 1 inch (25%) of clay above that, and about 1/4 inch (about 5%) of organic matter on the top. 2) Drainage. Dig a hole 1 foot square and 1 foot deep and fill that with water. After that water drains away refill the hole with more water and time how long it takes that to drain away. Anything less than 2 hours and your soil drains� too quickly and needs more organic matter to slow that drainage down. Anything over 6 hours and the soil drains too slowly and needs lots of organic matter to speed it up. 3) Tilth. Take a handful of your slightly damp soil and squeeze it tightly. When the pressure is released the soil should hold together in that clump, but when poked with a finger that clump should fall apart. 4) Smell. What does your soil smell like? A pleasant, rich earthy odor? Putrid, offensive, repugnant odor? The more organic matter in your soil the more active the soil bacteria will be and the nicer your soil will smell. 5) Life. How many earthworms per shovel full were there? 5 or more indicates a pretty healthy soil. Fewer than 5, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, indicates a soil that is not healthy. to see what you have now and help you determine what you may need to do. Your plants could be having problems with nutrients because 1. they are not available, 2. nutrients are not available because of the soils pH, 3. the Soil Food Web is not yet working and feeding your plants. Spraying pesticides without identifying the pest problem is not organic. Keep in mind that Neem products are pretty broad spectrum poison just an most other organic pesticides and the synthetic ones.

You asked for a good simple game plan. First, learn to distinguish the good bugs from the bad bugs. Google "collards pests" "basil pests" etc. to narrow down the bad guys. UC Davis has an IPM site that has photos of most bugs, or maybe MA has a site like this. It's sometimes a good idea to let the first crop of aphids "bloom" so that they can feed the first crop of predators. Also, if you spray anything, you want to be sure you are not inadvertently upsetting the whole cycle -- if you kill off all the bad guys, the predatory insects (who you want on the job) will leave your garden and go looking somewhere else for food. And of course you do not want to harm the predators (good guys). Learn to recognize parasitized aphids: predatory wasps lay eggs in them and eat them from the inside out, so if you have "ghost aphids," you don't have to do anything. Then, simplest things first, check each plant daily. The little green worms on cabbage-family plants are hard to see at first, but look for the holey leaves and eventually you'll get good at spotting them and picking them off. Next simplest thing is a jet of water, which will knock most aphids off but isn't much good with bigger bugs. For them, I use a squirt of Dr. Bronner's peppermint liquid soap (or something similar) in a quart spray bottle filled with water. Be sure to spray the undersides of leaves, too. I have no problem eating kale that I have sprayed with this weak soap solution. A resource I like is Edward C. Smith, Vegetable Gardener's Bible, which lists a few basic insects and strategies. For instance, he likes to use a garlic spray, and he gives a recipe as well as which bugs to use it for. Other gardeners have made big claims for other saponin-containing plant-based concoctions such as yuca root (sold in ethnic grocery stores as rhizomes), which you can grind up yourself and make various concoctions. Or aspirin water to prevent disease, maybe not letter-of-the-law organic but certainly spirit-of-the-law organic. I would do this before I would buy a product, but that's me. If you're looking for organic no-brainer "big guns," many gardeners use neem oil sprays for everything. I, myself, prefer not to buy products (cost and residues), so I have not tried this. Of course, a long-term strategy is to make your plants as healthy as possible by using lots of compost and spending enough time in your garden every day to spot any problems while they are still small ones. You can also try spraying with aerated compost tea as a disease preventive (it's not registered for that use, but many people who use it claim it has that effect).

It has been established now that users of rotenone have developed Parkinson's Disease at a two hundred and fifty percent greater rate than the general population. I would be pissed if I bought vegetables that may be contaminated with this stuff. Rotenone is destructive to the liver as well as the nervous system in humans, and less than an ounce of it can kill a kid. Speaking of the N word, it's completely naive getting yourself in a situation where you feel you got to use this stuff, I'm with Kimmsr on this one, the purist approach follows a deeper philosophy and understanding of how nature really works. Better planning simply makes the whole job just that more pleasant with the organic approach. The purist approach has worked in our garden extremely well for over five years now, it is simply less work and more effective in every way. Part of the purist approach for me is low nitrogen, high nitrogen even when completely organic causes a lot of infestations becuase it temporarily weakens the plant. I bet everyone who is an advocate of organic pesticides is a high nitrogen advocate. I scarcely bother with nitrogen anymore, focusing on micronutrients and carbon. I've been very surprised how many fewer problems I've had since almost completely backing off on nitrogen fertilization. The university says it's the only major shortage of my soil. Bah humbug, I grow just about everything under the sun, fruit, vegetables, vines, bushes, trees... you name it and I live in Dallas, very tough weather. No infestations, no diseases, it's been a great learning experience defying conventional wisdom but totally fun. When I laid off the high nitrogen, I noticed, no more attacks. The purist approach for me never had anything to do with politics or an existential gaia angst, I'm a right winger, it just clicked in my head one day that organic gardening should be cheaper, easier, and superior in every way. I stopped trying to mimic conventional gardening by substituting an organic product for a synthetic one, I got out of this line of thinking. Proper irrigation helps enormously as well in preventing disease and attacks. Nothing has lead me to change this thinking as the results have whispered in my ear for quite some time, now.