I have searched the internet high and low as well as a few gardening books and still can't figure out what kind of bug this is.
They are all over the leaves of my potato plants and as you can see they are stripping the leaves right off of the stems. As of right now they aren't bothering any of my other plants but I'm afraid they will be before long.
I've been catching them and placing them in a jar. I was told that I need to squish them but eeeeewwww...I just can't do that.
If you know what they are please, please enlighten me!
While talking of insects I'll show you a few others that I snapped a picture of recently.
I've never seen a baby praying mantis (just full grown adults) so I thought this was pretty neat. He was hanging on to the underside of our porch roof until we got a broom out to get him down. I thought he was pretty cute until he started jumping towards me.
7 comments:
I just looked this up in my Ortho home gardener's problem solver book, and it looks like the larva stage of a Colorado potato beetle. It says you can use Ortho bug-be-gon multi purpose insect killer spray or dust. Hope you get rid of them...ewwww!
I have them all over my potato plants also, and they have striped about 5 or 6 of my plants, I thump them when I see them, and that squishes them without the mess! I live in WNC, and I have never seen them before, if that works, let me know!!
Carmen....
Gee, why didn't I think of that. I have seen the potato bugs too but never thought of them being in the larva stage.
I don't want to put any chemical sprays on the garden so I guess I will just continue to collect them in a jar unless I can talk the boys into squishing them.
I'll tell ya what they are, they are HORRIBLE LOOKIN' THANGS!!! Gosh I thought they were some kind of freaky spider!!! Eeekkkkkk!
I don't know? But, since I started having a garden I have seen the weirdest bugs ever!
Jessica - Hello from Manitoba, Canada! We too do organic gardening and do not like chemicals. We have a product here called ROTINONE. It is a natural product that works well. Perhaps you can find it in your area? We also find it helpful to get under the leaves and pull off the leaves with the orange eggs on them and squish them as well, to prevent the eggs from growing into the real bug! Good luck!
Yep, it's the Colorado Potato Beetle larvae. You can dust your potato plants with hydrated lime to get ride of them, or sue the old remedy of plucking them off by hand and dropping them into a jar of kerosene. They can destroy potato plants in no time flat. Another solution is to get guinea hens, but your neighbors might not like that. Guineas are noisy.
The moths caught in the act might be cabbage moths, but I'm not sure from the photo.
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