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find the grubs and eggs amid all that greenery. To cut a long story short, the beetles won round one.
However, the next year I knew what I was looking for and I instituted early-and-often hand-picking. That fall, I cut down all of the dead fronds and raked up the mulch, adding the debris to the chicken coop for our flock to pick over. It also helped that I started to squish the asparagus beetles immediately upon their arrival that year, so my harvests broke the earliest cycles of asparagus beetles' egg-laying.
    In this photo, a predatory stink bug has impaled an asparagus-beetle grub on its long snout.
     
    But the tides didn't really turn until predatory stink bugs showed up. During the height of the asparagus-beetle infestation, I noticed the first of these beneficial insects dining, but one bug wasn't able to make much of a dent in the beetle population. However, by the next year, the tables had turned, and there were enough stink bugs and few enough beetles that the former were able to keep the latter in check. In recent years, my only nod toward asparagus-beetle control has been to squash one or two adult beetles and perhaps ten eggs in the spring, then to step back and let the predatory stink bugs do the rest of the work.
    Which brings me back to the moral of the story. If I had sprayed Bt when the infestation began, the asparagus-beetle population wouldn't have built up to the point that predatory stink bugs would have come to call. And the chemical may also have harmed the beneficial insects, so there might not have been any predatory stink bugs around to hunt down the beetles that survived. This is the primary reason I eschew chemicals (even organic ones) in the garden. Sometimes, doing nothing will yield much better long-term effects, as long as you can hold onto your temper in the meantime.
     
     
     

Part 3: Out-thinking the bugs
     

Chapter 5: Timing
    The ecosystem-level approach to insect control that I explained previously is the best long-term solution to bug problems in the garden. But the technique can feel painfully slow as you wait for your garden to come into balance. What do you do in the meantime?
    I like to start with timing my plantings to avoid the worst insect problems. I mentioned in chapter 1 how I use timing to keep cabbageworm problems to a minimum, by planting early in the spring and late in the fall when the butterflies aren't out and about. Below, I'll regale you with two more examples of using planting time to outwit pests.
     
    Squash vine borers
    Our first approach to squash-vine-borer control was spraying Bt. Visit the glossary for more information about this and other chemicals mentioned in the text.
     
    Squash vine borers were our archnemesis during our early years on the farm, so much so that I even resorted to spraying Bt on the plants' stems. And I'm glad to say that the Bt didn't help. Why am I glad? Because if that seemingly innocuous spray had proven effective, I might not have figured out less intrusive ways to keep vine borers in check.
    Variety selection was part of my solution, as I'll explain in the next chapter, but the biggest reason I started being able to harvest summer squash is because I learned to succession plant these speedy vegetables biweekly in the summer garden. Here in zone 6 (last frost: May 15, first frost: October 10), I plant crookneck (summer) squash on May 1 (a gamble), May 15, June 1, June 15, and July 1 (a slight gamble), a schedule that allows us to be overwhelmed with tasty squashes despite heavy vine-borer pressure and with the use of no other control measures beyond variety selection.
    Yes, the vine borers move in and kill the squash plants eventually, but not until after I've collected at least one big harvest from each bed. By the time the earliest vines start ailing, I have another planting of summer squash just waiting to take their place. Those of you living further north can simplify this campaign further since your vine borers generally