In years past my answer would have been a quick “NO” but this year has forced me to rethink everything I thought I knew about flea beetles. Flea beetles are tiny, shiny, dark colored beetles that hop like fleas and eat little holes in the leaves of many garden plants. They are very attracted to everything in the cabbage family including kale, radish; cauliflower; broccoli, and to flowers in that family including alyssum and stock. Those particular inects are called cabbage flea beetles and they are the ones I’ve noticed in other years, but this year I’ve heard from customers about another type of flea beetle that likes tomatoes and eggplants and other plants in the nightshade family! It’s unlikely that your cabbage-loving flea beetle will start eating your tomatoes, but it’s possible another type of flea beetle, the potato flea beetle, will drift into your garden. Yep, they can fly, and the wind carries them, too.
Why are they so terrible this year? They like warm dry springs, just like the one we’ve had. They don’t like alternating warm and cold weather, nor are they fond of rain. A cold rainy or snowy spring disrupts their life cycle. We’ve just had two dry springs in a row. Last year May was cold and mostly dry, this spring has been warm and dry. Flea beetles rejoice!
So, what can you do to control flea beetles? There’s lots of information out there, so let me sum it up for you. The basics are that soap sprays don’t work, pyrethrum sprays will work (there are both organic and non-organic versions of this insecticide, so be sure you get the one you want) and certain cultural controls will help.
Yellow sticky traps will slow them down a little. You can vacuum them! This is not a bad idea if you have a vacuum cleaner with a cord that will reach your garden, or a handheld model. Flea beetles overwinter as adults in garden debris, so you can rake up mulch and dead plant material, and rototill the soil in the fall. That won’t help this year, but it can help for next year. Also, next year, you can cover susceptible seedlings with row covers when you plant. That only works if there aren’t flea beetles in the soil when you plant. Another technique for next spring: you can sacrifice a crop to them–trap cropping–and hope they aren’t so happy that they multiply and attack other plants. Radishes and mustard greens are two of their favorites, and some organic gardeners have had luck using them as trap crops.
For more information, read Whitney Cranshaw’s great article on them here http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/insect/05592.html
Good luck to everyone. I’m watching my tomatoes like a hawk and if I see a single flea beetle I’m grabbing the vacuum.
