Daniel B. Martin wrote:
I use Sevin only in the most desperate of situations. I prefer to
hand-pick the BadGuys. Flea beetles are "smooshed" with fingers.
Larger insects are dropped into a can of detergent solution.
Eggplant pests in my garden include:
- Flea Beetles
- Colorado Potato Beetles, both adult and larvae
- flat green guys (name unknown) which don't move much
- Harlequin bugs
- Stink bugs
- Curculios
- Mexican Bean Beetles
Some gardeners have trouble with hornworms and slugs too.
Daniel B. Martin

That is my MO also, but I succombed to the nuclear WMD Raid as true
dispair with my peppers. I use Sevin usually only once on very small
eggplant plants, which gives them a growing start, and then I daily
squish the flea beetles. Mine are doing well.
I nipped that other critter in the bud that appeared from nowhere
last summer. Potato beetle??? Looks like a swollen tan dog tick, and
younger ones like "boogers". (Sorry.) ha ha These guys are
voracious.
Small green grasshoppers also take a share, but hop fast.
I have pulled, in two different hordes a few weeks apart, over 150
each time, of a caterpillar that has attacked my brocolli, savoy
cabbage, and curly kale.... into the soapy water pot along with the
Japanese beetles. The eggs are a tiny flat spot of yellow on
underside of leaves, and the biggest worms are about 1 inch long,
yellow underneath, red head, and backs are lengthwise black, grey,
white stripes. Anyone know what moth lays those eggs? (I don't know
what the max size of the caterpillar would be, if allowed to live.)
That cottage cheese container of water with a few drops of
dishsoap pretty much takes care of every bad critter. Even those
fuzzy white flies, if you hold it under the mass, so they they jump
into the container, and not escape.
Kira