How do you control harlequin bugs?

My kale patch is decimated by harlequin bugs. There are too many for hand picking I am bringing the vacuum out to suck them off. Do you have the harlequin bugs on brassicas? How do you get rid of them?

May, I placed several bird baths in my veggie gardens, also would add a cross bar on top of several stakes, making a nice perch for our feathered friends and helpers.

A row cover material over the kale patch with wire supports may be of help.  It has helped me in the past with Cabbage Whites.


Peace

I encourage wasps to eat my cabbage worms.
I don't know any way to get rid of harlequins except by squishing. They are sluggish pre-dawn, and can be tapped off into a cloth and mass murdered, like Japanese beetles, but that's all I have come up with. I don't try to grow brassicas past about late May, I harvest them out. Too many predators and too high heat.

I ignore them and remind myself to never grow summer cole crops again...

Cabbage loopers and harlequin bugs start so early here and the kale had hardly begun to get edible leaves when they appeared this year.

I am not sure if they have a predator?

I have flats ready in the shade house to seed some fall cole crops and will see if growing in the fall into the winter can improve the harvest.

It's said they have few predators. The vacuuming worked pretty well though bending over to flip every leaf was hard on my back. I got the majority of adult bugs and will come back in a few hours for a second round. There are still lots of egg clusters but maybe I can use soap to kill the nymphs.

If this is still not working, I might have to pull the patch and disrupt their life cycle before the fall crop comes in around August.

I did not have harlequin bugs, I would have from time to time squash bugs, doing their thing with my summer squash.  I used two scrape boards 12 - 16 inches long, joined end to end with a strap hinge, placed on the ground, hinge side up in the garden.  The little suckers like something to hide under, in mornings flip the boards over, and as Pearl said, slam the boards together, squish goes the bugs.  Still had to deal with the eggs, I used soap and oil to coat them.

The best way I found to beat them was growing the squash in containers with fresh soil.  That worked well, as I only needed a few plants for my use, it would not be a good work around for a larger family or market growers.


Peace