War on Beetles

If you're a seasoned vegetable gardener, your hackles are likely fully raised in the summer months.  There's ALWAYS a battle to be fought in the garden.  Be it rabbits climbing under fences to munch on greens or raccoons climbing over fences to nibble on sweet corn.  We won't even mention the deer.  No, no, we won't.  It's the pests of a smaller variety that seem to cause the most trouble (funny how that works).  I'm surprised and pleased to report that my latest battle with the Colorado Potato Beetle (CPB) has made me a 'winner', and I ain't talking about the Charlie Sheen kind of 'winning', people.

I observed these little dudes making swiss cheese out of my Kennebec potato foliage one happy summer day in late June.

This is the destructive larval stage of the CPB.  Thankfully, these guys are slow and mostly stationary.  Rather than fight them with chemicals, I opted for hand-removal.  This is one of the benefits of having a smaller home garden.  I filled a bucket with soapy water, put on my gardening gloves (the foliage was covered with CPB larvae droppings) and plucked these suckers into water.

Poof.  Job done - and quite easily accomplished at that.  Perhaps I should have offered them to the chickens and helped make some more edible proteins out of these guys?!  I assure you I'm not some maniacal killer.  All living things need to 'eat' and are just trying to make it in this world, but don't mess with my spuds, son!  I will retaliate!