I've resolved to keep the asparagus beetles from denuding my asparagus fronds so that hopefully we can finally harvest asparagus next year.  So far, I've just been patrolling my asparagus a couple of times a week and knocking the adult beetles into a cup of water, then tossing them to the chickens.  Even though the beetles are tiny, my favorite foragers (the old Golden Comets) are quite capable of picking them out of the grass before they fly away.

The picture on the left shows the eggs laid by the beetles.  These are more difficult to deal with, but I've had pretty good luck squashing the eggs between my thumb and finger, a technique that seems to work better than trying to rub the eggs off.  I'm hopeful that killing the adult beetles and squashing the eggs will be sufficient to break their cycle of predation, but if the evil little grubs hatch out, I'm prepared to spray Bt to stop them in the act.  I learned last year that if I let the grubs go, the beetles will reproduce several times in a year and will eat my fronds completely bare.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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