This is my first year growing pumpkins. Grew squash last year. I had a very large infestation of the darned things this year and did hours of research. I have a bee hive a few yards from my 1/4 acre patch so I will not use any insecticides etc. Although as with any method, this is time consuming but very effective in killing both the nymphs AND adults. Get yourself some "Castile" soap. Kirk's makes it and Dr. Bronner's & probably others. It is an old fashioned hand (bar) soap. I found Kirk's @ my local grocery store. Usually not found in Wal-marts etc. Shave or grate about 1/3rd of the bar into 32 oz. of hot/very warm water and let it dissolve. Put it in a spray bottle, set it half way between stream and spray (this gives it just a bit of foam with the spray) and spray those buggers. The little ones die on contact and the adults may move a few inches to a foot before they keel over. This soap works because the "castile" means it was made with natural (olive, coconut, vegetable etc.) oil. It causes them to suffocate. This has worked awesome for me. I go out in the evening when the bees are done and avoid spraying the flowers. Have to pick up and look under the leaves and you can get several at once if they are clustered. I seem to find them most often under the leaves that are already dying around the edges. As for the eggs, I got tired of cutting and bagging so I just use a grill lighter and burn them til they are obviously useless. If you have a hard time finding the soap you can get it on line but check the grocery store first. Kirk's Castille Soap comes in a white paper wrapper with blue and red printing and I buy mine for $1.99 for a 3 pack.

We just found our crop infested with squash bugs. This being our first crop we were not familiar with these pests. After doing lots of research on them and seeing what we could do we chose to try something organic and we took the time to comb the plants first and find them. When we did we had a small bowl of water with a small amount of dish soap in it and placed the bug in the bowl (where they drowned). As for the eggs we used tape and pulled them off the leafs that way. However to our surprise those boogers were on both sides of the leaves. So we had to go over it again. Then we watered the plants and what we missed came to the top to dry. And we caught them as well and drowned them. We caught today 33 adults and some 400-500 eggs (no exaggeration). We will be doing this daily for the next couple weeks. Then we will be moving our crop next year to another area and take precautions from the beginning. Making sure to plant things around them that repel the SB. Good luck with these things.

Plant squash where it has not been planted before. Immediately put low tunnels over the plants' area, using PVC or electrical conduit as the framing and either insect barrier-type row cover or tulle netting over the bed. Use small boards to make sure the fabric is in firm contact with the ground on all 4 sides. This low tunnel should keep the pests off your squash plants for as long as you leave them covered. When it is time for pollination, you have the option of uncovering the plants so they can be pollinated by insects or you can uncover them just long enough to hand-pollinate them yourselves and recover them. Other less drastic measures to protect the plants would be to wrap the stems with aluminum foil, spray the plants with spinosad (relatively new pesticide and some people believe it works pretty well for SVBs but I haven't tried it), or spray the stems with neem. As the plants grow, heap up soil over the vines/stalks to they can root in multiple places. Plant Seminole pumpkin, a native winter squash from Florida that SVBs seldom bother. I plant mine in the middle of all my other squash plants and let it run wild among them, hoping it will help the more susceptible plants "hide" from the bugs. I plant rat-tail radishes among susceptible plants and they seem to help. As a bonus, the rat-tail seed pods are edible. I don't believe there is any "solution", organic or synthetic, for SVBs and squash bugs, other then building a pest-proof high tunnel or something similar, and even then I think it likely you couldn't make it 100% pest-proof. Hand-picking squash bugs and stink bugs when you find them helps, as does checking the backs of plant leaves for their eggs, removing them and destroying them before they hatch. With stink bugs, squash bugs and leaf-footed bugs, I find them pretty easy to suck up with a hand-held vac with strong suction (or a shop vac if you have a long enough extension cord to reach the garden), especially if you catch them while they are young. Younger ones in the nymph stage are easier to catch than adult ones. I haven't tried spraying the plants with kaolin clay to see if it repels them, but I have a big bag of Surround WP and am going to try it this year. I always start new squash plants in cups when I put the first squash plants into the ground. When the second set of plants is ready to go into the ground, I plant them as far away (in my case, in a small garden area 150' away from my big garden) from the original plants as possible. Then I start more seeds in cups and, when those are transplant size, I sneak them into a flower bed. Then, I start another set of seeds. If you're constantly starting new plants, planting them in scattered areas around your property if possible, and protecting them as well as you can, you will be able to get a squash harvest despite the SVBs and stink bugs. With tomato plants and the triplet pests of stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs and blister beetles, I haven't had much success other than handpicking them. Once again, you have to get them early while they're small and in the nymph stage. Some people have luck spraying a garlic barrier spray around the garden and that can work with some pests and not with others. Some years I have a lot of pest problems, other years I have relatively few, but I get a pretty good harvest every year. I garden organically but use almost no pesticides at all because some of the organic pesticides are every bit as hazardous as the synthetic ones and I won't poison the environment that our family and animals live in. It warmed up early here, although nights are still cold. We were 28 degrees here at our house this morning and had a frost all night long....it was already settling in on plants and vehicles at 10 p.m. last night. The pests have responded to the warm temperatures by showing up early. White cabbage moths have already showed up here looking for cole crops and I don't even have my broccoli in the ground yet. I take the early arrival of these pests to be a bad sign. Some people inject Bt into the stems of squash plants in an effort to kill SVBs with mixed results. There's just a limit to how far I'll go, and that goes beyond what I am willing to do. I don't have time to run around giving my plants injections. Dawn

SVBs do attack gourds, although it seems like gourds are not necessarily their favorite thing. Sometimes they kill mine and sometimes they don't. They seem to bother decorative warted gourds more than they bother birdhouse gourds. The nice thing about catnip is you only have to plant it once. After that, it will reseed itself everywhere. I always let mine bloom its head off because the flowers attract beneficial insects. Catmint is another great companion plant for squash and other plants. I have "Walker's Low" catmint growing near my squash. Amy, Gently rub a leaf of your catnip-looking plant between your fingers and see if you pick up a catnip aroma. Their scent is present from a pretty early age. I think I have lost one Seminole plant one year, and I never checked it to see if it was SVBs that got it or if it was bacterial wilt or something similar. The other Seminole plants just filled in the area where the deceased plant had been growing and within a couple of weeks, it was so well filled-in that no one but I knew that a plant had died there in that row. In a good year, Seminole runs 30-40' across my garden and I let it do as it pleases because it grows in conditions, and under pest pressure, that nothing else can and will tolerate, except for other C. moschata winter squash. This year I planted both the regular fruited Seminole and the ones with the larger fruit. In the past, I've only grown the regular one. C. moschatas are as close to being SVB-proof as anything else I've ever grown. Squash bugs and squash vine borers are a big problem roughly 8 years out of 10 for everything except the C. moschata types. Over the years, I basically dropped all the C. pepo and C. maxima types of pumpkins, replacing them with C. moschata types. I just got tired of fighting the SVBs every year, so figured I'd work smarter instead of working harder, and replaced them with C. moschatas that deter the SVBs for me. Dawn