squash update - it's not good

I had a post written over the weekend about how well my squash was doing. It was growing so fast!

zucchini

It looked beautiful!

galeux d'eyesines winter squash

I already had fruit set!

(can you see the baby winter squash hanging on the vine?)

But things change quickly.
First, I saw a couple of clusters of small reddish-orange balls on a couple of my winter squash leaves.


I didn't know what they were and I found them right before I went to Saturday market, so I took a couple of photos and asked the MGs and my farmer about them. They were squash bug eggs, probably one of the most common problems affecting squash. They can really devastate a crop, so I knew I would need to go home and remove them. I tried scraping them off with my gloved hand, but they are too small and sticky. I then tried using a paper towel soaked in soapy water, but what worked best was just scraping them off with my fingernail. Honestly, it grosses me out to think that they are bug eggs so I just pretend like they are little clusters of seeds - that is what they feel like so it works. Anyway, I put a bucket of soapy water under the leaf because some of the eggs fall right off, and I want them to land in the bucket of soapy water. Plus when they stick to my fingers I just dip my fingers in and they fall right off. I know some of the eggs landed in the dirt, and I don't know if they will still hatch or not - but there wasn't much I could do about it so I tried not to worry about it.

(close-up of recently hatched squash bugs and their eggs)

As soon as I started looking for more, it went from bad to worse. I ended up spending FOUR HOURS searching my four squash plants for egg clusters. They were on the underneath of several leaves, so it took careful attention to detail. It was quite laborious, but I felt like I got them all. Occasionally I found a group that were recently hatched, which was even grosser to me because they look like spiders. I had a serious arachnophobia when I was younger and though I am much better now, I still have a visceral reaction to the sight or thought of spiders. Generally when I put the bucket of soapy water underneath them and brushed them, they fell right into the water. Some of them ran away and I just tried to squish them.

Then of course I went out the next day and found a couple hundred more. Evidently the bugs are egg-laying machines, so it is important to take a three-pronged approach - kill the eggs, kill the babies, kill the adults. I heard if you put a board on the ground, the adults will sleep under it so it is a relatively easy way to kill a bunch of them at once (I've tried this and never found any underneath the 5 or 6 boards we laid out). Another way to find adults is to spray the plants with water around the roots (where they hang out, away from the light) - they don't like being wet, so they crawl up the leaves to dry off. I've been doing this every morning and generally find two or three.

Then, the second problem. While I was out there, I noticed one of the plants was really dead. The leaves were all yellow and limp and it was obviously done with life. I pulled it, and it came right up as though it wasn't attached to anything! Upon further inspection, the plant was rotted at the base of the stem. I came inside and searched and quickly figured out that it was squash vine borers. Although my other three plants (two winter and one summer) seem healthy, I thought I should go check on them...and I can see that they look similar at the base of the vine too.

It doesn't seem like there's much I can do at this point - obviously you can't reverse the damage, and it looks so bad to me that I would be surprised if the plants live. But I suppose it's worth trying. So far, there's a lot more about preventing than getting rid of them: kill the adults before they lay eggs (put out yellow pans filled with water. They are attracted to the color yellow but then they fall in the water and drown), or kill the eggs before they hatch and burrow into the vine (They look like small black dots).

The only option at this point is emergency surgery - cut a slit in the stem where you can tell the borers are doing their damage, and kill whatever borers are inside. The surgery could kill the plant, but it will die anyway, so it's really the thing to do. I guess it's better than nothing. So frustrating!

When I was 8 years old I had a small garden, and I grew watermelon and pumpkins but never got to enjoy the fruits of my childish labor because of the squash bugs. I think I am just not meant to grow squash!