Help!Cucumber beetles devouring my leafs...

Hi,

I'm a second year gardener an have a new location to garden in this year. Last year thing's went great. This year I have cucumber bettles! There just hang out all day eating my leaves on the squash. Is there a organic solution for them? Most organic sprays I've seen have garlic an cayenne pepper in it. But also have liquid soap. The liquid soap doesn't seem Organic to me. Any suggestions would be great. Liquid soap or not

Thanks Permies! Jeff

I've been having the same problem! Does anyone know a good companion plant or natural solution for this? Seems like these kinds of things are more and more not in the public wisdom. My kid brought something home from school supporting a group called PeoplePerfectPlanet, a bunch of nuts that want to to make a competely man-made ecosystem and replace Mother Nature with it.

Here is a decent article with quite a few methods to save your produce. Enjoy!
cucumber beetle info

cucumber beetles seem to like pig weed more than cucumber leaves. Other amaranths may work as well.

Jeff Roan wrote: Hi,

I'm a second year gardener an have a new location to garden in this year. Last year thing's went great. This year I have cucumber bettles! There just hang out all day eating my leaves on the squash. Is there a organic solution for them? Most organic sprays I've seen have garlic an cayenne pepper in it. But also have liquid soap. The liquid soap doesn't seem Organic to me. Any suggestions would be great. Liquid soap or not

Thanks Permies! Jeff

Here are some examples of pig weed and Hopi Red Amaranth taking beetle hits instead of cucumber and squash. The pig weed out grows the damage so i hope the other amaranth does too. Good luck

More on amaranth as trap crop.

I've embedded the video below.

I use Medina orange concentrate quarter cup/ 1 good squirt of Dr Bonners/ and a tablespoon of OMRI perthirm[spelling] took a long time to figure out but it has worked on most pests and does not seem to impede my soil building//you have to get under the leaves too

So, the potato beetles arrived in my garden while I was out of town for work. They practically destroyed my eggplants. On short notice, I mixed 2 gallons of water, 20 drops citronella oil, 10 drops peppermint oil, 10 drops lavender oil, and 5 drops oregano oil in my sprayer. I hosed my plants down from above and below twice a day for 3 days. Now I spray every day or two. The potato beetles have left and the plants smell pretty good. This mix has worked on my cucs, squash, and melons. I just make sure to keep shaking the sprayer to keep it mixed up. OP, how are your cucs fairing?

I had the same issue, there were dozens of striped cucumber beetles on each of my squash plants (Not the western corn rootworm beetles, in pics I have seen the stripes look different). I heavily dusted the immature squash fruits and flowers with DE and sprayed the leaves with neem oil. I went from seeing hundreds of the things to the very next day needing to look for a few minutes to find a single beetle. You have to keep up on it though since rain washes everything off and they will return but if you reapply after every heavy rain you can keep the beetles away almost 100%. Luckily they seem to have left the garden too, they didnt migrate to any of my other crops.

The ones I have must not have got the memo about amaranth being tasty, I stopped pulling the pigweed and lambs quarter out of the beds as weeds (In the amaranth family) and they ignored them and kept eating the squash, they didn't even bother to start eating them after I sprayed the squashes.