More Blister Beetles

We've been chasing blister beetles around the garden for a few weeks now but did manage to put a hurtin' on a few of them a couple of nights ago.  While picking cherry tomatoes Wednesday afternoon I heard the bugs before I saw them.  It didn't take much looking to find them working over the strawberry plants in the row to my right.  The only good thing about blister beetles is they like to travel in a pack and you can kill a whole bunch of them at once when you find them.  While we had been contemplating keeping the strawberry plants in the ground for the year, finding the beetles in them made the decision easy.  It was time to torch them.  We use a propane torch for this task partially because we weren't worried about burning the plants and partially because we can get heat down underneath those plants and really kill some bugs.

After quickly scouting the rest of the garden, we also found a mess of them under a pile of tomato clippings I'd pruned off earlier in the day.  Torched.  Finding them under that pile made a good case for keeping a clean garden and also showed me how I was going to set a blister beetle trap.

And finally, another horde found skeletonizing my edamame.  

Because so much of this group was exposed to us rather than hidden down in foliage, we took a different course of action in this area.  We used the heaviest hitter in our extremely small arsenal.  We sprayed them with an OMRI approved, knock down, pyrethrin compound called Pyganic.  Then we watched them do a death dance by flashlight.  It was extremely satisfying given that this edamame is not likely to recover from the damage they inflicted.  Blister beetles = yuck.