CPB is a nightmare with no easy solution, unless the scale is very small or unless you have a big appetite for endless hand-picking. The weather has been dry here and the soil is droughty and when that happens CPB gets going early. High fertility is by far the best limiter, IME. My home garden had high fertility and high diversity/small plantings and a I rarely have more than a few CPB's. Same this year, haven't seen one yet in the home garden while my big plantings elsewhere are crawling.

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!

Brendon, I understand the concept, and if it were really the case that people were saying that fire suppression (whistling) was the primary trigger for the initiation of bark beetle outbreaks (tree death), then you might have a point. But no one says that, or at least it's not something that I've ever heard said or seen published among bark beetle specialists. And for that matter, the paper doesn't even report on whether there's a difference between the year without whistling (pre-fire-suppression) and the next. Based on their data sources, I doubt they had the statistical power to prove the negative. Drought stress is commonly considered to be a main trigger for regional conifer bark beetle outbreaks. But even when regional outbreaks are occurring, the susceptibility of a given stand to infestation is affected by that stand's structure and composition. Fire history is a factor that affects stand structure and composition. These points are well-supported in the literature for many systems. Back to your analogy, the idea that fire suppression could affect bark beetle susceptibility is not nearly as unlikely as the idea that whistling could affect tree death. There is a mechanistic connection. Also, these associations they're reporting are significant, but not absolute. For example, they find that 24% of the time that there was an AMO of at least 1.6, there was an outbreak in the study areas. Otherwise, when the AMO was This post was edited by saccharum on Wed, Oct 16, 13 at 23:50