What to treat potatoes with before planting to protect them against Colorado beetle
The Colorado potato beetle brings a lot of trouble to farmers. As a rule, it develops in several generations. It survives the winter as an adult insect. After winter, 30-60% of them burrow back into the soil for several months and come out in mid-spring. Therefore, it is not so easy to get rid of the beetle. It is resistant, hardy and multiplies rapidly. This was reported by SSPDaily.
Folk remedies for protecting potatoes before planting
As soon as spring has arrived, special traps for the beetle are placed in the garden. For example, you can use cans for traps. Slices potatoes are soaked for a day in a strong urea solution (1 glass of urea per 1 liter of water) and then placed in traps. The trap jars are dug along the beds and checked every day. The poison should be changed weekly.
Some owners add wood ash, onion husks, or beans to the hole when planting the tuber. These agents should repel the beetle. This will not hurt the harvest. On the contrary, it will serve as a top dressing, and the beetle should be scared away.
You can also sprinkle the beds with fresh pine sawdust. Gardeners advise planting dill, calendula, nasturtiums, peas, or beans between the beds of potatoes. These plants are also believed to repel Colorado potato beetles.
Farmers growing potatoes in small plots often resort to folk remedies. But as a rule, they are all temporary, so they are not particularly effective due to the beetle's survivability. Thus, experts recommend using chemical and biological products to combat it.
What to treat potatoes with before planting
To protect potatoes from the Colorado potato beetle, growers treat them before planting. The procedure is carried out after checking and selecting tubers.
A more reliable means of controlling the Colorado potato beetle is to treat tubers before planting with insecticides. If you follow the instructions for their use, toxic substances are completely removed from all parts of the plants before harvesting.
Importantly, these products cannot be used to treat ultra-early potato varieties. This is because, since the vegetation period of these varieties is 40-50 days, this time is not enough to completely remove toxic substances from the tubers.
Matador Grand systemic preparation for the control of the Colorado potato beetle helps protect the plant from other pests, such as whiteflies, moths, the May beetle and even the wireworm. In addition, it is effective in the fight against macrosporiosis, alternaria and other diseases.
To effectively apply Matador, you need to correctly calculate its use. For 30 tubers for planting, it is recommended to dissolve about 30 ml of the substance in 200 ml of water. Pour the solution into a spray bottle, spray the tubers, give them some time to dry completely and turn them over, re-treating them on the other side.
According to experts, a combination of such drugs as Prestige (100 ml) and Maxima (70 ml) shows good results. The resulting mixture can be used to treat about 100 tubers.
It is important to note that since Prestige remains in tubers for about 70 days, it is not suitable for early potato varieties.
To process early varieties of tubers, you need to choose preparations with a short duration of action. For example, the Tabu preparation, which remains in potatoes for 45 days.
