How to Fight Colorado Potato Beetle: Proven Methods Without Pesticides
They say that the easiest way to get rid of the Colorado potato beetle is to plant potatoes later than your neighbors.
It is possible that this trick works and the hungry beetle, confused, moves to live with the neighbors. But where is the guarantee that later it will not return back?
Science has not yet figured out how to get rid of the pest forever. The beetle can even adapt to pesticides, so experienced gardeners never use the same composition against the pest several times in a row.
Besides collecting the pest manually and destroying it, there are several other useful options.
1. Do not rush to plant potatoes. Instead, place bait, which can be potato tubers treated with malathion. This way you can catch an adult, which will certainly produce offspring.
2. When the first shoots appear, they need to be dusted with wood ash, but it is better to use birch firewood.
3. Pour 300 g of wormwood and 2 cups of ash with boiling water, let it brew, strain, dissolve in 10 liters of water and use to spray potatoes. After this, you can again sprinkle the tops with ash. Ash is also sprinkled on the soil between the bushes.
4. You can also use corn flour, which, as gardeners say, later swells in the stomach of parasites and leads to death.
5. You can also sprinkle the rows with pine or birch sawdust. Before the potatoes bloom, this procedure is carried out once every 2 weeks, and then once a month.
The main thing is not to rest on your laurels. The beetle will definitely return after the neighbors use some poison on their plot. Therefore, a real summer resident is always on the alert.
