Potato Pests
 

Geez, now you have me all interested in growing potatoes.

What are common potato pests and how do you treat?

Colorado potato beetle, potato flea beetles, slugs, millipedes, tuber moth, aphids, leafhoppers, sowbugs, and wireworms. I probably left off a few varmints.

There are many ways to research what you can do for insect pressure on potatoes. You may go to a variety of websites such as:

[url]http://www.uky.edu/Ag/Entomology/entfacts/veg/ef304.htm[/url]


Internet Resources on Potato IPM below is great:
[url]http://ipmnet.org/cicp/crops/potato.htm[/url]



I try not to treat for them. I am growing, increasingly, many potatoes organically, and my breeding work is to find outstanding clones that do well without pesticides. The conventional growers that I so work with use pesticides on my plots, but even then I try to get them to minimize the spraying when possible. Systemic insecticides used by growers on my plots are listed in my field books.

I grew a plot of potatoes that met all field tests that allowed for seed potato certification by the State of Washington. They were grown on organic ground. All they could find on my field of potatoes were Lady Bugs and I did not have to spray at all. The potatoes cleared for Nuclear generation seed potatoes.

Tom Wagner

something that fusion mentioned somewhere bears repeating. grow parsley, fennel, dill or carrots. let some go to seed. you will have lots of volunteers the following year, and years after, but you just may see potato beetles disappear. thats what happened in my garden at our old house in calumet. the plants host parasitic insects to the cpb. previously to letting those plants go to seed, i had beetles in the garden in spite of spraying and hand picking for 3 years running. that garden became beetle free 3 years in a row after i let some parsley, fennel and dill go to seed. not one beetle to be seen. i need to do this at our farm now where cpb are a big problem for me. it will be great if it works again.

keith in calumet

Thanks Tom and Keith. I happen to have quite a lot of parsely and carrot seeds so I'll give that a try. You just plant in the potato plot amongst the potatoes?