It's not good to have the best potatoes in the village. Today I found a load of colorado beetles and i crushed them all. My question is does anyone know a homemade treatment that is effective against Colorado beetles.
Diatomaceous earth works pretty good, and I also use neem oil mixed in water with a few drops of dish soap in a spray bottle. Consider creating your own garlic/pepper spray, which involves soaking a dozen chopped garlic cloves, one part chopped hot pepper or 1 tablespoon of cayenne with four parts hot water, strain and bottle. Spinosad is supposed to work on them, although I have not used it.
Could I pulverise really stinky nettle juice onto them. Bacillus thuringensis is quite good against all kinds of insects. I have hundreds of ladybugs on my potatoes, so I hesitate to use poisons, I guess the ladybugs eat colorado beetle larvae. Garlic pepper mix sounds good. I sprayed some cabbages with nettle potion against aphids, I will go and check if it has worked.
I am not organic so my potatoes get sprayed through out the growing period. I also get help from a particular weed here. I have no idea what it is and its pretty invasive. But shallow rooted and easy to pull up. Potato bugs like it much better than my potatoes.
Deep Forest, I had to research what DE is, DE (DIATOMACEOUS EARTH) is a non toxic flour-like powder made from fossilized skeletons of micro-organisms called diatoms.
The larval stage of a beetle is a grub. Nematodes kill grubs. Nematodes can be purchased relatively cheaply via Amazon.com. From reading some of your postings I gather you live in France? You should be able to get the little critters without too much difficulty.
Thanks fatbaldguy, I see that these things are available here, excellent piece of advice. I think I crushed them all, but if the attack persists, I will think about using nematodes.
