Below is some information from ATTRA, with organic and physical ways to fight this beetle. One advantage to using row covers is that the plants don't need pollination. If you could plant this year's crop as far away from previous planting sites, and covered the plantings immediately, you might limit infestations. Diatomaceous Earth (DE) works on beetles, but it has to be dry to do it. There is a theory that if you plant flax among your potatoes, it will repel the beetle. Sue Here is a link that might be useful: Controlling Colorado potato beetle

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!

Hand-picking the adult beetles and large rubs is easy. The adults are very slow and can't fly. If you take a large bowl you can just gently shake the tops of the plants where they congregate and they fall into the bowl. The juvenile beetles can fly and are more skittish, but if you go out in very early morning they are sluggish from the coolness. The main problem is the small grubs which are to see and hard to get off, and can get very numerous. When you spray bt, concentrate on the growth buds of the foliage, that where the grubs are most concentrated. Don't bother with the powder it's expensive and less effective, get the soluble stuff. I mix it with water and a little dishsoap in a hand spray-bottle. If you already see larvae it's a bit late for spraying, gotta hand-pick every couple of days until the numbers are reduced.

Jan, Last night I saw one more adult Colorado Potato Beetle on a potato plant, and I left it for Mr. (or Ms.) Turtle. I hope he or she found it and ate it. I rely heavily (almost entirely) on beneficial birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects to control pest insects in my garden. It works. I know it works. Sometimes it is very hard--even exceptionally hard--to be be patient and wait for the process to work, but I really do try. Here's another example of how I didn't wait, and then regretted it. I overwintered some potted angel's trumpets (both brugmansias and angel trumpets) in my barn/garage last winter. It was the first time I'd overwintered them there, having previously kept them either inside (but there's too many for that now, and they are too big) or by overwintering them in the tornado shelter in a dormant state. It stayed warm enough here this past winter that the angel's trumpets remained leafed out, although a couple of them dropped some leaves when we when down to 18 degrees a couple of nights, but then leafed right out again. A lot of them kept blooming into December and January and others started blooming in February. Every morning (unless it was very cold), I'd open the garage door and let the sunshine come in, or I'd drag them out into the sunshine. One day in Feb. or earliest March, I noticed one plant was covered in aphids. Since I assumed lady bugs were still hibernating because it was still pretty chilly, I sprayed the plant with neem oil. (I did look for lady bugs and didn't find any on any of the angel's trumpets before I sprayed.) The neem oil took care of almost all the aphids. Two days later a mama lady bug showed up, and within a couple of days we had lady bug larvae everywhere. So, you see, if I had been patient for a day or two longer, the lady bugs would have shown up and I wouldn't have had to spray the neem oil. I really need to work on being more patient. I'll try to write later today or tonight when I come inside from the garden about how to attract more beneficial insects to your garden, and why you'd want them there. I need to hurry up and get outside now before it is too hot to be productive out there. You also can search this forum by typing "beneficial insects" into the search box and read old threads too. I know I've written about beneficials a gazillion times. Dawn