Paula, Of course it is tempting. Quick fixes always are. However, it is better overall to go with whatever hurts the beneficial insects the least...and I know that you know that. : ) Having said that, I would defend to the death anyone's right to use the pesticide of their choice, whether it is organic or synthetic in nature. Different strokes for different folks, and all that. There are times when even the most ardent organic or mostly-organic gardener may find their back against the wall and decide to use a broad-spectrum chemical pesticide in order to save their plants and their crops. That's doubly true during extended drought. It is hard enough to keep a garden productive in a regular year with a regular pest load. Doing so in a very dry year which also is a year with generally high (in some cases, astronomically high), pest levels...well, it can be incredibly hard and sometimes impossibly hard. So, if someone feels the need to use Sevin or Malathion or whatever, I think they should do so after carefully weighing the risks, and I hope that no one here would make them feel like using a chemical solution was wrong or was a mistake or whatever. I'm always going to prefer to garden as organically I as possibly can because that fits in with my desire to garden in a manner that is as sustainable as possible. However, if I felt like the only way I could save my garden from some sort of a major pest was by spraying it with a broad-spectrum pesticide, I just might make the decision to do so. Does that mean my philosophy has changed? No. It just means I find myself dealing with a pest for which organics do not offer a good solution. You have no idea how much I have struggled this year with the idea that I could buy a bottle of bifenthrin or something "just this once" and spray it and wipe out the pests. What keeps me from doing it? The feeling I would be endangering pollinators and beneficials, for one. Still, if I felt I had to do it or risk losing the garden's harvest, I would do it. I also would not feel guilty afterwards. Even though I prefer to raise our veggies, fruits, herbs and flowers without the use of synthetic chemicals, I certainly don't buy only organic food at the grocery store. So, is it logical to hold my home-grown food to a higher standard 100% of the time? No. Sometimes I think I expect too much from myself in that respect. If I buy conventionally-grown strawberries at the grocery store, it is possible that maybe they were sprayed with various fungicides and pesticides multiple times during the life of the plant. So, even if mine were sprayed once with a chemical pesticide or fungicide, wouldn't mine still be much healthier than those raised conventionally? I don't think anyone here should have to feel bad about doing what they have to do to save their garden or a specific crop, or as far as that goes, to save their sanity. If last summer's weather/climate, followed by this summer's weather/climate, is not enough to drive all of us stark raving mad from the frustration of trying to keep our landscapes and gardens pretty and productive, then what would it take? Dawn

I have not seen any yet this year, but I am sort of halfway hoping they will show up here at some point..... Not because I am crazy, but because they eat grasshopper eggs. It doesn't matter to me in a normal year when the grasshopper population is only average, but this isn't a normal year. We have tons of grasshoppers, so we need for the blister beetles to show up at some point to eat up a lot of the grasshopper eggs. If you start fighting the blister beetles when they first show up, they are fairly easy to kill by spraying them with insecticidal soap or by spraying the plants they are eating with a product containing Spinosad (which is organic). The brand of Spinosad I usually have in my shed in made by Monterey and I believe it is labeled as Monterey Garden Insect Spray, but there are several different Spinosad products on the market now. The longer you let the beetles stay around and reproduce, the harder it is to get rid of them and, as you no doubt have noticed, they can strip plants down to naked stems in no time at all. Sometimes, here on the internet I see people advising you can handpick them. Well, maybe some folks can handpick them where they live, but when they show up here, they generally reproduce so quickly that you don't have one here or one there or a dozen here or a dozen there....you have hundreds and hundreds of them, as Larry's photo illustrated so well. And, if you choose to make any contact with them, wear gloves or they'll make you break out in blisters. I can think of at least 1,000 things I'd rather do on a hot summer's day than to stand out there in the heat hand-picking blister beetles. If I had them present in small enough numbers that I could handpick them, I'd leave them alone anyhow, knowing they'll eat a lot of grasshopper eggs and knowing their population is so small that they cannot eat all my plants. (But, my garden is really big. Even a fairly small number can devastate a small garden.) If I had them present in large numbers, I'd probably spray Spinosad on plants I didn't want eaten....which would be perennial flowers, herbs or veggies, or any annual veggie or herb plants that still are producing and which I want to continue harvesting. If my garden was pretty much through producing for the year, I'd let them have it. It is very frustrating to have them devouring plants, but then, on the other hand, in a state like ours where grasshoppers can become a huge problem some years, I hate to kill off one of the few predatory insects we have that do help control grasshoppers. When we lived in Texas before moving here, I don't think I ever saw a single blister beetle once in my life, and I lived there for almost 40 years. The first time I saw them here, they showed up and totally devoured a beautiful Sweet Autumn Clematis vine that was about 5 years old. Then they disappeared and never touched the veggie garden. It was a couple of years later that they began showing up in the garden, but I think the first year that they damaged it enough that I sprayed them with insecticidal soap was 2010, and we had been here since 1999. So, they really haven't been a persistent problem here....just a periodic one. Some types of birds will eat blister beetles, and there is at least one kind of predatory blister beetle that eats the eggs of the striped blister beetle. HippyBKC, I am sorry to hear they devastated your garden like that. If they were here and were devastating my jalapeno peppers, I'd be out there in the garden killing every beetle I found. Jalapenos are one of my favorite crops and I can many, many pints of them every year so I'd hate to have anything destroying my crop. If you need to spray Spinosad and cannot find it in a local store, I've ordered it online before and had it arrive pretty quickly. One of the products containing Spinosad is Captain Jack's Dead Bug Brew, which is a reference to how and where spinosad was discovered.

It is a nice list, but I have companion planted forever and want to stress that it is far from a proven science. In fact, in multiple university studies, the companion planting claims do not hold up in controlled studies done to study their efficacy. I am at the point that I ignore all those comments about "improves growth or flavor" and I ignore 98% of the comments about any type of plant repelling specific pests. Very few of those supposed benefits have been observed in my garden, and I've been companion planting in this location ever since we moved here in 1999. The reason to companion plant is to attract beneficial insects, and that's why I do it. Here's one example from what I've learned over the years: I can surround my cabbage beds, for example, with a solid border of all the companion plants said to repel cabbage worms, and my cabbage plants (and all other brassicas susceptible to the same pests) will be totally devoured by cabbage worms anyway. Often, those cabbage worms are sitting so close to the plants that supposedly repel them that they can use the companion plants to travel from one cabbage plant to another. So, take those sorts of recommendations with a grain of salt and just save yourself the hassle by growing your brassicas underneath row covers or insect netting placed over low tunnel hoops. It is the single most effective thing I've done in my garden in terms of deterring all types of brassica type caterpillar pests from devouring brassica plants. It is a gazillion times easier and more efficient/productive that devoting garden space to companion plants that don't repel the pests anyway, and it is preferable to using Bt 'kurstaki' in the garden, since the Bt can harm desirable butterflies. In the back garden I felt like I had some success with common wormwood repelling some but not all caterpillars from brassicas, but common wormwood is a garden thug that gets huge and reseeds readily. Fortunately for me, I believe the flooding of 2015 killed all my wormwood. I don't intend to replant it, and live in fear of it spontaneously making a comeback from self-sown seed and taking over the whole back garden again. There are some things that do seem to work. For example, growing horseradish (preferably in pots since it is invasive) does seem to help (though not 100%) keep Colorado Potato Bugs off your potato plants. But, guess what? If the CPBs show up and are repelled from the potato plants by nearby horseradish, guess where the CPBS will go? Straight to the tomato plants. So, remember you also can see some unintended consequences. I find hand-picking and drowning the CPBs as soon as they show up to be the best way to manage them. It is important to find them the first day they show up, before they can breed and lay eggs. Growing basil with tomatoes seems to help repel hornworms, but you'll see an occasional hornworm on a plant anyway. I feel like four o'clocks planted as a heavy border along two sides of the garden also repel hornworms. Otherwise, there's no real explanation for how I can grow hundreds of tomato plants each year and almost never see more than 1 to 6 hornworms the entire growing season. The area where companion plants shine is in the way they attract beneficial insects, which serve multiple purposes in your garden. This is how I use companion plants nowadays, after determining that their other reported benefits are hard to see, hard to prove and harder and harder to believe. For attracting beneficials, you need a wide range of companion plants, and the most important is to have something that is green and, hopefully, in bloom virtually year-round. Diversity is important so instead of growing tons and tons of each companion plant, I grow a few of many, many different plants. The most useful plants for attracting a wide range of beneficials are those that have small flowers or large flowerheads composed of many small flowers (like yarrow, tansy, sweet alyssum, etc.) and daisy type flowers. I feel like the flowers/herbs that attract the most beneficial insects to our garden are these: sweet alyssum, dill, fennel, yarrow, statice, purple poppy mallow, petunias (especially Laura Bush petunias with their heat tolrance), feverfew, nicotiana, small flowered marigolds like lemon gem, tangerine gem, and red gem, cilantro/coriander (you have to leave it and let it bloom in order to attract the beneficials so you don't harvest this cilantro as cilantro but you can harvest the seeds for coriander), parsley, tansy, silver tansy, comfrey, zinnias, cosmos, buckwheat, spike speedwell, nasturtiums, and moss rose. Many other herbs will attract beneficial insects once they flower, and this includes catnip, catmint, lemon balm, sage, basil, mints (in pots only as they are incredibly invasive), borage, and wormwood. The beneficial insects that I most want to attract to my garden, in addition to bees of all kinds, are green lacewings, brown lacewings, hover flies, lady bugs, minute pirate bugs, big-eyed bugs, and all the little parasitic wasps like brachonid wasps, ichneumoid waspas, and trichogrammas wasps. The plants I listed above do attract them and I think the beneficial wasps, in specific, are why I don't have a lot of caterpillars anyway, notwithstanding the annual onslaught of cabbage worms. I believe the beneficial wasps eventually, in due time, would control the cabbage worms, but before that could happen, you'd have holey plants, so I just exclude them from the plants in the first place. You don't have to run out and buy tons of packets of flower and herb seeds. Many seed companies sell pollinator blends and good bug blends that attract bees and other pollinators as well as the beneficial insects I listed above. You can buy as little as one seed packet of pollinator or good bug attracting plants, or you can buy the mixes by the quarter pound or pound. I have used seed mixes like these from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, Wildseed Farms and Botanical Interests, among others. Because many of the plants that attract pollinators are large, getting quite tall and spreading out wide, the easiest way to grow them is as border plants along the edges of your garden. You can choose smaller, more compact companion plants to grow in the same beds as your garden plants, but understand that even these can take up a lot of space if you aren't careful. It is hard enough to squeeze them into a large garden, and considerably harder to find space for them in small gardens. A lot of the herbs and flowers I grow to attract beneficials are grown as shorter border plants along the edges of raised beds or, if they are too tall to be true edging plants, I grow them at the ends of each raised bed, but not in the middles of the bed where the actual crop plants are growing. If you've ever seen a borage plant growing and spreading massively to try to outgrow the tomato plants beside it, you'll understand where I'm coming from. Of course, almost all my companion plants reseed readily, popping up anywhere and everywhere. I try to let them stay where they sprouted when I can, but if they start to outgrow the vegetable plants they're sitting next to, I either prune them back really hard or yank them out. I also grow tons of wildflowers outside the garden fence on all sides of the garden because they also attract beneficials. The area where most people fall short when planting to attract beneficials is that they fail to plan for the cool season. I have lady bugs, bees and other beneficial insects out even in January, frantically searching for food, so I do the best I can to provide for them. I always leave henbit wherever it pops up and let it bloom because so many beneficials depend on it in the cool-season. I have sweet alyssum and chamomile in bloom by February of most years and they attract many beneficials. I often have dianthus and violas blooming in February or early March. For early beneficials, you need extra-early plants to attract them and also to feed them. I never, ever, ever under any condition would consider ground ivy/Creeping Charlie to be a companion plant. It is a rampant, highly-invasive thug and I don't tolerate it anywhere. If you let it take hold and get established, you'll have it forever and it will be on a constant mission to take over every square inch of planting space, and it isn't just happy to occupy the garden. It will fight to stay in the lawn and in flower beds. Right now, if you walk out into my frozen garden, you'll still find green catnip plants (regrown since we dropped down to 4 degrees a few weeks ago), tansy and dianthus. You'll also find beneficial insects on them on all but the coldest days. You may not see the beneficial insects early in the morning on cold days, but you'll see them out by mid-day. When planting both cosmos and zinnias to attract beneficial insects, search out old-fashioned varieties that haven't had their nectar/pollen tampered with by modern plant breeders. Also, plant the shorter varieties that stay more compact and are easier to manage or you'll end up with huge cosmos and zinnia plants (easily attaining 4-5' in height) shading out surrounding plants. Same thing with nasturtiums. Grow only the short, busy ones, not the vining ones. While some of the more modern zinnias have tolerance of/resistance to powdery mildew bred into them and they look nice, they don't attract and keep beneficials like the old OP varieties do. I love companion planting and mixing in herbs and flowers with fruits and veggies all over the garden, but you have to manage the way you use companion plants or you'll find too much of your resources (soil, water, even light) going to them and not enough going to the edible plants you're growing. There are a few plants that make great trap plants, attracting pests to them. The way to use them is to grow them outside the garden itself in order to lure those pests away from the garden. Sunflowers are my favorite for this purpose. If you plant sunflowers outside the garden, maybe 10' from the garden, they'll attract stink bugs to them. Then, you can use the method of your choice to kill the stink bugs. Anything I can do to attract stinkbugs away from the garden in summer is worth doing. They are a horrible pest that feed on the fruits of most summer crops. The grain type amaranths are useful in this way to as they can lure some pests away from your garden.

Larry, Someone else got 5-lobed bells this year too, maybe it was someone on one of our OK gardening Facebook pages. I'll get an occasional five-lobed bell but not often. It sounds like you were very busy, even as a child. I think you would have made a great doctor because you would have been trying to save your patients, not trying to kill them by supper time (I hope). My best friend contracted polio from the vaccine when we were young children. He survived it and appeared to have mostly recovered, but had a limp forever after. The polio came back when he was in his 40s or early 50s and it killed him. I never knew that could happen---like he wasn't really cured. It stayed hidden in his body for decades and then came back strong. Nancy, I'm already exhausted and we have almost 24 hours more to go. She is more exhausted though. We were running around all day and when we got home about 2 pm, she grabbed her pajamas and told me she was going to go take her bath and get ready for bed---and she was serious. I told her it was not bed time, but swimming pool time, and she woke right up. Now she's fighting to stay awake until after dinner time. Unless she gets a second wind, I think it will be a really early night for her tonight. This week the kids are fascinated with icebox melons. I harvested 13 of them yesterday, ranging in size from about the size of an orange to the size of a cantaloupe and they are in love with the little ones, which I think are the variety Mini Love, and also in love with the fact that there are three colors of flesh---red, yellow and orange. We have tons of icebox melons to eat, and even are sharing them with the fawns and the mothers every evening. We slice and eat melons daily. The nice thing about the icebox sized ones is that they have a pretty long shelf life, so you can cut one or two every day and there's less (if any) left over to put away in the fridge. I don't even put all the melons in the icebox----I just leave them sitting on a counter until we use them. Usually if we cut one or two, we eat all of them that day, or throw out the leftover pieces for the deer. It is so much more convenient than having to cut up a huge one and deal with pieces of it in the fridge for days and days. I didn't do anything in the garden today. I'm just hoping and praying the heavy rain they're saying we will get on Sunday and Monday actually happens. There's been a ton of rain to our south in Texas, particularly in the areas that are in Extreme Drought, so I know that those folks are relieved. The amount of rain they got won't remove the drought, but might knock it back a good deal. The cooler temperatures are very, very nice, so at least we have that, whether the rain comes or not. The garden still looks pretty bad, but when I consider that we're in Severe Drought, I realize it looks about as good as it possibly can considering the weather we are having. Dawn