Our First Pest Infestation: the Aparagus Beetle

Common Asparagus Beetle

There's some misconceptions about Organic Gardening that I've run into repeatedly over the years, including the idea that growing vegetables & fruits organically means taking a “do-nothing" approach.  But in fact, just because you're not going out and spraying chemical insecticides, it doesn't mean you sit back and let the pests take over your crops either!  There's plenty of approved control methods available for the organic gardener, ranging from natural sprays to releasing parasites/predators, and good ol' fashioned hand-picking.  Hand-picking is a fancy way of saying just squish the bugs!

Depending how much area you have to cover, the squish method of controlling pests may or may not make sense.  In our case, we have a small asparagus patch that has been struggling along for the past month or so, producing some good stalks at first but then producing spears with curled, ragged, unappetizing looking tops.  We originally thought it was because the hose didn't reach that far and we'd had a couple weeks without much rain, but then we harvested a couple of spears with tiny tell-tale black things sticking out the side, almost like tiny mouse droppings -- but we recognized this must be some kind of egg.

A little searching around the awesome UMD Home & Garden Information Center website brought us to this page showing a photo of the eggs on the asparagus spear.  We went outside to double-check our research and to see if we could find any adults or larvae on the plants (these beetles pupate in the soil).  Lo and behold, our plants were completely covered!!!  Click any of these photos for close-up views.  (Photos by Chris Maxwell)

We read that asparagus beetle adults usually drop straight down when you shake the plant, so if you hold a bucket of soapy water under the plant, more than likely they'll just drop straight in.  This worked very effectively for us!

For the eggs and the larvae, you just have to pull them off and drop them into the bucket by hand.  If you're feeling a little vengeful, you can also squish the larvae, as they make a satisfying POP!  However, if you're not in the mood for squishing bugs, the soap should break down the oils of their soft bodies and kill them soon enough.

Since we live in an area where there are multiple generations of asparagus beetles each summer, we'll check over the patch about once a week to make sure to stay ahead of them!


Of course, if it's not one thing, it's another.  Right after we were pretty sure we'd gotten all the beetles off the asparagus patch, we caught a pair of Colorado potato beetles in the act of reproducing their next generation!

But more on that some other time.  (sigh!)