What is a good defense against the Octozombie?

I always use the Cabbage-pult wth plant food as it deals heavy damage to the octopi the zombie throws at you, as well as the zombie itself.( a lvl 1 cabbage-pult's plant food can kill a regular zombie in 1 hit!)Potato mine/Primal potato mine can kill it the moment it steps on land, but they don't work in the sea.

VolleyJosh's answer is fine for Big Wave Beach, but with later versions of the game, Octozombie can be encountered in a lot of other terrains and the dude can cause be a real pain as a result. A few additional options to consider:

• Iceberg Lettuce (Level 1 if encountered in a solo fashion; level 11 if part of clusters); Stunion

The goal with these plants is to just delay so that you have time to do something without Octozombie covering everything.

• Instakills including but not limited to Squash, Cherry Bomb, Lava Guava, Jalapeno, etc.

Instakills are a valid strat for the sake of just quickly eliminating the Octozombie, but be cognizant that if it's an instant that waits you commit to triggering it right away by planting on top of your target. It's super annoying to place a squash 3 tiles ahead and it just gets covered in octopus.

Additionally, there are modifications you can make to your planting strategies.

• Do NOT plant the back column

This might seem a bit odd, but it is really hard to eliminate an octopus that's placed on a plant in the backmost column unless you've brought something that's effective at backshots or launch a mower. The former can be feasible in standard play, but high level play often has limits on seed slots, which may make that amount plant specialization less viable.

When I implement this strategy, I will eventually plant the back column, but it will be heavily delayed until the back half of the level when things are more robustly established ahead in columns 2 through 5.

• Don't shy away from using burner plants

Often sunflowers (of most any type) can serve as an effective buffer plant to place in columns 4 through 6 since with a single burst of sun they've paid for themselves and anything extra is bonus. Additionally, you can use cheap or free plants to buffer and waste octopi on like puffshrooms.

• Stacked melee plants

Primarily these are bonk choy and pokra as they can deal a lot of damage to close range targets very quickly and thus remove octopi faster than they can be thrown. They can become overwhelmed if the level's zombies become exceedingly strong by comparison, but at that point you're probably pushing too far anyways and need to pull back to easier levels.

• Shoveling

This is not a great strategy in my opinion, just because it can be hard to pull off effectively if there's several Octozombie threats at once. But to summarize, if a octopus is getting hurled, you've probably got half a second to a second to dig up the plant it's going towards. If you do so successfully, you can force a miss and collect whatever sun that gives you.

This is very feasible to do if only 1 or 2 Octozombies are on the lawn and there aren't any other major threats. But usually if 1 or 2 Octozombies are the biggest threats, then they're likely better handled with the other strats I mentioned above.