What's Eating My Potatoes?
Potato pests work two shifts: beetles defoliating above ground, and unseen tenants tunneling the tubers below. If the leaves look fine but the harvest is ruined, read to the end.
The usual suspects
Colorado potato beetle
The signs: Leaves eaten to ragged stems, fast — a full defoliation takes days once larvae hatch.
What it looks like: Adults are yellow-domed with ten black pinstripes; larvae are soft brick-red humpbacked grubs with black spot rows. Orange egg clusters shine beneath leaves.
What to do: Handpick daily in season, crush egg clusters, mulch deeply with straw, and rotate beds — they overwinter in last year's potato soil. Spinosad works when picking can't keep up.
Flea beetles
The signs: Dense pinhole shotgun patterns on leaves, heaviest early.
What it looks like: Tiny hopping black beetles.
What to do: Healthy plants outgrow it; cover young plantings where pressure runs high.
Potato leafhopper
The signs: Leaf tips and edges yellow, curl, then scorch brown ('hopperburn') in early summer.
What it looks like: Pale wedge-shaped green insects that fly up in small clouds when you brush the row.
What to do: Row cover young plantings; insecticidal soap on nymphs under leaves. Damage mimics drought — check for the hoppers before blaming the weather.
Wireworms
The signs: Clean, narrow tunnels drilled straight into tubers, discovered at harvest.
What it looks like: Tough, golden-brown, wire-stiff larvae up to an inch long, worst in beds recently converted from sod.
What to do: Avoid planting right after turning lawn; trap with buried potato chunks on skewers pulled and trashed weekly; harvest promptly at maturity.
Voles
The signs: Gnawed hollows and tooth-marked craters in tubers near the surface, plus shallow runway paths in mulch.
What it looks like: Paired incisor marks, damage concentrated where mulch is thickest.
What to do: Pull mulch back from hills in late season, trap runways, harvest as soon as vines die back.
When it's not a pest at all
Dark target-ringed spots on lower leaves are early blight; a fast gray-black collapse in cool wet weather is late blight — act on that one immediately. Scabby corked patches on tuber skins are common scab, a soil condition, not an animal.
Or just point your phone at it
Snap a photo of the leaf, the bug, or the droppings, and Harold — the advisor built into Homestead Paradise — names what he sees, tells you friend or foe, and what he'd do next. Honest when he's unsure, and careful where it counts.
Put Harold's Eyes on it — free 14-day trial