Colorado Potato Beetles
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- July
- 10
Ask the master gardeners
Q: I would love to grow potatoes in my vegetable garden, especially some of the hard-to-find varieties — blue, purple, etc. But the plants are always destroyed by bugs. Any suggestions?
A: The bugs you refer to are probably Colorado potato beetles. It is their larva that feed on potato foliage.
To prevent the adults from laying eggs on the plants, use a mulch of clean straw or hay (salt hay is preferred as it does not have weed seeds). This will deter the bugs.
No one is sure why they don’t like the mulch, but it works.
Nancy Ross, master gardener, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Westchester
This entry was posted
on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 4:51 pm by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
