I thought this was an exceptionally good article on cucumber beetles.Cucumber beetles.

Probably the first things we will have to deal with are potato and onion pests. What do you have to say about these crops' pests?

And, yet, another good use for Spinosad. I'm really loving that stuff. I need to get to Atwoods and see if they brought in a case.

I guess the larvae eating the roots or bulbs explains their interest in the turnips. Funny, tho. Seven Top is a special turnip for harvesting greens. Their roots aren't much to speak about. I guess the flea beetles don't know this.

Yay to Wolf Spiders!

I find all the ATTRA articles on pest control useful and have lots of them bookmarked so I can refer to them as needed.

The only potato pests I ever see are Colorado Potato Beetles, and I don't necessarily see them every year. I just hand-pick them (wearing disposable medical gloves) and drop them into a bowl of soapy water to drown. If you handpick every single one you see early in the season, you can get them all before the population explodes. If you see and ignore 3 or 4 CPBs, all of a sudden you will have hundreds.

You also can spray with Spinosad, but I generally don't. I don't want to eat food sprayed with any pesticides at all if I can avoid it. I probably don't use Spinosad or anything else more than once or twice a year. I've had the same bottle of Spinosad for years and years and haven't used it all. It may be too old to be effective by this point. I always start with the least toxic remedy, so for me, hand-picking wins out over spraying anything. If I work my way up from least toxic to most toxic option, with the spraying of any pesticide (organic or synthetic) being the absolute last thing I resort to. Thus, I rarely make it to the final resort of spraying. It is easy to develop an over-reliance on spraying, and I try to avoid that. In my lifetime, I have seen many highly-touted organic pesticides become increasingly less useful over time because of overuse, so my feeling is the less I use anything, then the more effective it will be when I do need it. Overuse of pesticides, whether they are organic or synthetic in nature, leads to pests developing resistance to them. That's part of the reason that some forms of Bt do not seem to be as useful as they once were. I'd hate to see that happen with Spinosad. Then, there's the past history of some once-popular organic pesticides that people used a great deal until we learned how dangerous they were to human beings. Rotenone is an example of one of those. Once believed to be relatively benign to humans, we now know it is linked to some diseases like Parkinson's Disease. One thing that I worry about with products like Spinosad is that any of them might end up being the next rotenone. There was a time when no one thought rotenone caused any issues in humans and it was used for decades before we learned otherwise. Spinosad is so new that I wonder if somewhere down the road we'll find out it is not as benign as we think. The main way I use Spinosad is as a granular product that controls fire ants. It also is an ingredient in Slug-Go Plus that helps control pill bugs and sow bugs if they reach damaging levels in a garden. I almost never use it as a spray product. Sprays can affect many insects, both good and bad, and perhaps animals as well, whereas granular bait products only affect the insects that ingest them.

Growing horseradish (in pots, because it can be highly invasive) is said to repel CPBs. I don't know if it does, because some years I have some CPBs anyway, but it likely doesn't hurt. Horseradish is most useful if the pots it is growing in are placed close to the potato growing area.

I never see onion pests so cannot help you there. Is there a specific onion pest you have issues with?

Honestly, I don't do much for many pests:

1) Your garden is its own ecological system so you are going to have insects, good and bad, all the time. It is unrealistic to expect to have a pest-free garden.

2)Most pests are easily controlled by hand-picking early on, or by covering something like cole crops with floating row cover to keep the pests off the plants. Early attention is key. For example, if harlequin bugs show up on cole crops, I handpick and drown them immediately and after a few days of that, I generally never see another one. They are like Colorado Potato Bugs, though, in that if you ignore them when they first show up, their population can skyrocket amazingly quickly.

3) I focus more on attracting beneficial insects to the garden and letting them deal with pest insects. The beneficials handle most of the pests for me, so that lets me focus on the insects that are an issue. And, in general, I ignore pest insects unless they are doing a fairly high level of damage. Unless a person is heavily spraying their garden with pesticides, there's always going to be insects around, both good and bad. There's no such thing as a pest-free garden. Many pests are merely annoying and might, for example, chew holes in leaves, but I leave them alone if it is only minor damage. Beneficial insects need to have pest insects around to feed upon. If you kill off all your pest insects, what are the beneficial insects going to do since there's nothing in your garden for them to eat? They are going to leave your garden and go elsewhere in search of food. Then when more pest insects show up, you won't have the beneficial insects there to help you keep their population under control.

4) I focus on the early-season pests that harm seedlings. For example, everything needs cutworm protection early in the season. Otherwise, many young seedlings won't survive. During the rest of the season, I ignore caterpillars as much as possible except, of course, for being diligent about hand-picking cabbage worms and cabbage loopers off cole crops as soon as they appear. It is easier, overall, to just grow them under row covers though. Or, to spray with Bt if they do appear. Bt is wonderful for controlling earworms and European corn borers on corn, but planting corn as early as the temperatures allows often enables me to get a good corn harvest before the corn pests even show up, so I favor early planting as a pest control method.

Clearly no one wants to eat heads of lettuce with holes chewed in the leaves, so I might pay more attention to a pest that shows up on lettuce, but then I almost never see pests on my lettuce. Many caterpillars only do cosmetic damage and turn into beautiful moths and butterflies, so I ignore all those sorts of pests as much as possible and, in fact, grow plants specifically to attract some forms of caterpillars---growing enough parsley, dill and fennel, for example, to not only feed us but to feed the swallowtail caterpillers as well.

5) I feed the birds year-round, so my garden is always full of birds and those birds eat pests. I always have a birdbath for water for the birds and keep it filled year-round. Birds will control a lot of pesky insects for you. Most winter days we have dozens if not hundreds of birds here feeding and their tweeting and chattering is almost too much, but if the worst complaint we have in winter is that the birds are noisy, then we're having an easy winter. If you want for birds to be in your garden eating grasshoppers in spring and summer, you've got to be doing something to attract them to the garden, so I do all that I can to encourage the birds to be here. The same is true of toads, frogs, turtles, etc. I try to keep them happy and in the garden all the time because they eat a lot of pests. Unfortunately, turtles will eat low-hanging tomato fruit, but losing a few tomatoes is a small price to pay for having turtles on bug patrol in the garden.

Most of the pests that I consider a problem are only a problem in the years when there's tons of them. A few grasshoppers in the garden? I don't worry about it. But when big swarms fly into the irrigated green garden in summer as the surrounding fields dry out and turn brown, then the hoppers become a problem. Once the population of grasshoppers is that big, all the birds are eating all the grasshoppers they want and still cannot keep up with the population. Pesticides might knock the grasshopper population down for a few days, but then a new swarm flies in to fill the void. Even when we had a flock of 20-30 guineas that free-ranged on our property during the day and went into the guinea coop to sleep safely at night, the guineas couldn't even keep up with the grasshopper outbreaks in the worst years and each guinea can eat up to 2 lbs. of hoppers per day. Sometimes you win, and sometimes the pests win.

For all the time I spend in my garden, I bet I don't even spend 3-5% of it working on pest control. The major pests, beyond early-season things like cutworms, CPBs and flea beetles, are later to appear---squash vine borers, squash bugs, stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs, corn earworms, European corn borers, etc. All those later pests do direct damage that impacts the crop, so I do what I can to control them, but I never get all of them, and that's just how life goes. I bet that 95-98% of the insects in my garden on any given day are not doing enough damage to anything to warrant my attention. I just let them be.

Cucumber beetles fly in from the fields every day during the growing season. I'd drive myself insane trying to have a cucumber beetle-free garden (which is never going to happen anyhow without the use of toxic chemicals). I just try to knock back the early population hard in order to keep the overall population lower. Once the cucurbits reach a certain size in their growth, they tolerate cucumber beetle damage. Because the larvae of spotted cucumber beetles feed on corn roots, I like to kill all the early cucumber beetles I see, which I am seeing most years even before corn planting time rolls around. Spotted cucumber beetles feed on at least a couple hundred kinds of garden plants, so no matter what you grow, even if you don't grow cucurbits, you're going to see the beetles around.

To maintain your sanity in the garden, you have to pick your battles, and I do. Letting weeds grow in and near the garden is one of the worst things you can do because insects often live in and feed on those weeds. I have to be realistic, though, as we are surrounded by ranches where the pastures are mostly native grassland. Some pastures have lots of forbs mixed in, so those pastures really are filled with insects. There's no way my garden could be an insect-free oasis in the midst of an ocean of thousands of surrounding acres of grassland, so I just do what I can without losing my mind.

Different people tolerate different things. My garden always is full of bees and wasps of all kinds during the growing season, and they are amazingly beneficial. I'm just thrilled to have them in the garden. Wasps of all kinds, for example, feed on caterpillars. Some of my non-gardening friends are afraid to step foot in my garden because a bee or wasp might sting them, but I've learned to work around the bees and wasps and, for the most part, we get along. I might get stung by an agitated wasp once or twice a year, but if that happens, the world doesn't end.

A lot of people have issues with aphids, and certainly aphids pop up occasionally in my garden. Pea aphids, for example, will eventually show up on my sugar snap peas. What do I do? Nothing. If I am patient and wait a few days, the lady bugs magically appear and will, over the course of a week or two, eat all the pea aphids. I don't get many aphids on many other plants though, likely because I am exceptionally careful to avoid feeding high nitrogen plant foods to most plants. Plants with excess nitrogen are incredibly attractive to aphids, so this is an example of how a gardening practice can either attract a lot of pests or not. Many people overfeed nitrogen to their garden plants and then have to battle the huge population of aphids attracted to plants that were overfed nitrogen. I only give high nitrogen to the plants that actually need it, like onions and corn. With each pest a gardener encounters, you have to ask yourself if anything you are doing is attracting those pests to the garden. Sometimes a gardener can be inadvertantly attracting the very pests that drive them up the wall. Sometimes there is something about a specific variety that attract pests, whereas a different variety of that veggie is not a pest magnet. I don't grow Piricicaba broccoli as much as I once did because it seems to be a magnet for aphids, whereas Packman is not. When I notice that a specific variety attracts more than the usual number of pests, I drop it and grow a different variety.

One of the best trap crops is sunflowers planted outside of and well away from the veggie garden. Sunflowers are very attractive to stink bugs, so I use them to draw stink bugs away from my garden. It isn't that growing sunflowers outside the garden magically gives me a stink bug-free garden, but just that the sunflowers will attract some of the stink bugs away from the veggie garden. You have to find what works for you in your garden. I have as many flowers and herbs in my garden as I have food crops, and it drives my "old farmer/old rancher" neighbors crazy because they favor monocultures. A lot of them, too, think I'm wasting perfectly good garden space on "weeds" (their term for my herbs and flowers) when I could be using that space to grow more food. They also spray their monoculture crops, though, and I don't. I'd rather be surrounded by herbs and flowers that attract beneficial insects than surrounded by pesticides. It just happens that the herbs and flowers not only make me happy, but they work for me. And, as it happens, I still grow more than enough food. We have plenty for us to eat fresh, plenty to put up for future meals via canning, freezing, dehydrating and root cellaring, and plenty to share with friends. I could understand their objection to my use of space for herbs/flowers if I was whining that I needed more space to produce more food, but that doesn't happen---we get more than enough of a harvest. It is just that companion planting herbs and flowers among veggies seems offensive to conventional farmers and gardeners who prefer to grow monoculture crops, and the fact that I do it seems to make some of them very uncomfortable. And, I'll just add, that I never criticize their use of chemical pesticides, fungicides and herbicides unless their herbicides are drifting into my garden and killing my plants, so it does tick me off a bit when they come into my garden and tell me that my herbs and flowers are a waste of gardening space!

Found this really cool cheat sheet that includes some companion and trap planting ideas.

Interesting!