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

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

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

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