I learned something this season that I knew was coming down the pike but didn't know when, now I know when. For the first time in my gardening history I'll have to stop expanding the garden and start to shrink it next year. I've reached my upper limit on what I can successfully maintain and due to slowing down myself so goes the garden. Missing from next year's planting list will be Onions, Cantaloupes, and perhaps Butter beans. I'll still grow watermelons but on a smaller plot with smaller melon varieties, I just can't pick up those Big ones trying to tippy toe through vines without twisting my ankle or getting a hernia, ha. Will hold onto planting the main staples of the veggie world....as long as possible :)

That's a great idea. Squash and pumpkins are ideal for growing with little kids since the big seeds are easy to handle and sprout quickly when planted into warm ground. There are two meanings to "hills" when used in gardening. Sometimes it just means planting in small groups spaced a distance apart, other times it means actually forming a small mound and planting a group of seeds on top of it. The latter is commonly done to improve drainage and to help the soil warm sooner in the spring -- sort of a miniature raised bed. If your local farm is using elevated hills to plant their pumpkins its probably desirable for you to do so, especially if you're on clay soil. To make a squash/pumpkin hill I like to dig about a pit about 8-12 inches deep and 12-18" wide -- size depending on how large and vigorous the chosen variety is. I fill that pit with compost and, if conditions are dry, water it well. Then I mix more compost and any necessary soil amendments -- lime, fertilizer, ??? -- with the dirt I dug out and pile that back on top of the compost-filled pit. I form that into a slightly dished, flat-topped mound 8-12" across and, if conditions are dry, make a small moat a few inches from the base of the mound. I plant 4-6 squash/pumpkin seeds, again depending on how large a variety it is, in a circle on top of the mound. Once they come up I have to steel myself to thin them to two plants of a large variety or 3 plants of a small one. I know I have to -- otherwise all the plants will struggle when they're older -- but I truly hate it. LOL As for the grass, you'll want to clear a few feet around the hill so that the grass won't compete with the pumpkins for nutrients and water, but I've always planted my long-vined varieties at the edge of the garden and let the vines run out onto the lawn. That can get a little messy because you can't mow or trim close to the vines, but my DH isn't too obsessed with the look of the lawn so we're OK with it. You can line your hills up in rows or arrange them in a grid, both ways work. I don't think there are any borer-resistant pumpkin varieties. Most of what we call pumpkins are C. pepo or C. maxima and both those species have the hollow stems borers love. C. Moschata squash are borer resistant because of their solid stems and there are some round varieties such as Long Island Cheese and Fairytale are readily available. Unfortunately for gardening with a child, these don't have the upright shape and bright orange coloring of the traditional jack-o-lantern pumpkin. If you read through back postings you'll find a lot of information about defeating the SVBs. When I lived in PA and MA I never had any significant borer issues but I always took the precaution of throwing a shovelful of compost over the leaf nodes every yard or so in order to encourage secondary roots just in case. Since you've grown pumpkins before I'm sure it will come back to you once you get your hands into the dirt. Good luck and I hope your little garden helper enjoys it as much as my little helpers do.

DL, This is also my first year growing Seminole and I have had no problems so far and very little bug pressure this year. Seminole is of the species Moschata which is more resistant to SVB than the maxima species which I believe the Red Kuri belong to. I have 40-50 squash plants this year and lost 3-4. All Maxima. I could not find SVB entrance either. All in all it has been a very good squash year for me. I have not planted the Red Kuri but have Potimarron this year and have 4 or 5 nice squash on now. I have lost one or two plants out of this hill though.

Hi, Welcome to the forum. We are happy to have you here. We have folks posting here from many states and we're always happy to have new friends. Residence in Oklahoma is not required! : ) Familiar with them? They are the bane of our existence, as I am sure you would agree. In each case, good sanitation and garden cleanup is required. Whatever you do, don't compost plants with heavy insect infestations because the pests may overwinter in or on the edges of your compost pile. I bag them up in black trash bags (thick, heavy duty ones like lawn and leaf bags), tie them tightly closed and haul them to the dump with the rest of our trash. (We're really rural and could burn them, but I absolutely would not burn any brush piles in the current conditions nor would I encourage anyone else to do so while fire danger remains so very high). Spider mites are very hard to control and to prevent from over-wintering. The female mites overwinter both in the soil and also in cracks and crevices in bark. If you have raised beds made with wood edging, they can overwinter in cracks and crevices in that wood, or underneath it. One method that might help you knock back their population would be to spray tree trunks and woody trunks and limbs of small trees and shrubs with dormant oil during the dormant season. Spider mites thrive in dry conditions but don't do as well in wet conditions. If your winter is very dry, it wouldn't hurt to water your garden soil once or twice a month with a nice deep watering. It likely will kill some of the spider mites. The time to vigorously attack them will be next spring as soon as you have the slightest inkling that they are around. I had them popping up on potted brugmansias on the patio in either late February or early March this year and I pretty much ignored them for a while because I didn't think the discolored foliage possibly could be spider mites. By the time I actually flipped over a leaf and found spider mites everywhere on the underside of that leaf, the spider mite population was huge. This year I will spray the brugmansias with dormant oil in winter and then with neem regularly after that. Many of the best spider mite solutions cannot be sprayed on our tender vegetable plants in hot temperatures (over 90 degrees) because they can cause leaf damage and even plant death, so aggressively tackling the spider mites by spraying the plants in spring when temperatures are still below 90 degrees will go a long way towards controlling them. Also, be careful what you choose to use and don't mix spraying with oil-based products with spraying with sulphur because the two together (even if you use them separately within a few days) will kill plants. You also can buy and release spider mite predators in spring to get control of the population before summer's heat arrives. They are available from places like Arbico. Research each potential beneficial insect/spider mite predator before you buy and be sure you're releasing them at the right time. Some of them can live/work only under very specific temperatures and relative humidities. With the SVBs, what works best for me is to put hoops made f from either PVC or electrical conduits over the rows of squash and to put floating row cover (like Agribon or Reemay) over those hoops, and secure it to the ground. This excludes squash bugs and SVBs by preventing them from reaching your plants. There's a couple of ways you can do it. You can keep the covers over them "forever" and hand-pollinate your own squash plants in the early morning hours. This is the most effective method and will keep your squash producing all summer as long as disease doesn't strike. The other way is to keep them covered until they begin flowering, and then remove the cover and hope for the best. Usually, when you do this, the pests eventually find your plants eventually, but hopefully by then you'll have had some squash mature that you can harvest and use. Some people cut some of the floating row cover fabric into long strips (sort of like gauze bandages if you can picture that) and wrap the stems of their plants to help exclude SVBs. This is not a 100% failsafe solution, but it helps. I have used knee-high stocking with the toe area cut out to do the same thing, and some people use aluminum foil. All of these work best if you get the end of the wrapping material into the ground a couple of inches so the borers cannot enter the plant just below the soil level. None of these will necessarily keep the SVBs out forever, but every little bit helps. Because you have neighbors who allow these pests to essentially breed and live in your area, you'll have the best success in future years with using floating row cover. I don't know if there is anything you can do to save your plants at this point. You might try either a summerweight dormant oil or neem oil sprayed on ONE plant as a test. The good thing is that it ought to smother the eggs. The bad thing is that these products can burn foliage if used in extreme temperatures like you and we have now. If you want to try it on one sacrificial plant, spray it, wait 24 to 48 hours to see if foliar burn appears on the foliage and then, if you are satisfied it is safe for the plants, proceed and spray the rest of your plants. Did the SVBs eventually get into your Long of Naples moschata? For winter squash, I pretty much only grow C. Moschata and of all the ones I've grown, 'Seminole' (available from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange among other places) has been the most SVB-resistant. This year I haven't had much of an SVB issue until the last two weeks, but my Seminole, Corn Field Pumpkin and 'Tahitian Melon' (a C. moschata winter squash, not actually a melon) remain unscathed so far, and they are not even covered with floating row cover. I am so sorry I cannot offer any guarantee solutions that will sae your melons and squash. I would be incredibly frustrated were I in your shoes.....which is why I started using floating row cover quite a few years back. I don't know that I have neighboring gardeners who allow the SVBs to thrive on their property, but we have a form of native squash (inedible) that grows wild here and is quite abundant in unmowed areas and in wildlife management land along the Red River and I suspect the SVBs infest it which enables them to thrive and then spread to home gardens. Because the infestation is so wide-spread in your area this year, you can expect to see them early and often next year. That's just a fact of life. Be sure to plant your squash and melons in a new area where no squash and melons grew this year and cover them with floating row cover. That, along with any other protection method you use will help a lot. If you haven't read about injecting squash vines with Bt or Spinosad via a syringe in an effort to kill whatever borer grubs make it inside your plants, you might want to go to the vegetable forum and do a search on that topic and read what some folks do. Their success varies. I've never tried it. I have a big garden and too little time and I've never been interested in spending part of my summer (especially insanely hot summers) injecting my plants with anything when I can largely avoid the problem with floating row cover. Next year, I'd use every IPM technique possible in an effort to defeat the SVBs and squash bugs. With spider mites. the time to do battle is spring. In the summer, most of what you could spray will damage the plants so you find yourself in a can't-win situation there. As bad as the spider mites have been here, I've had a great harvest off the plants they infested. I believe my spider mite levels are dropping as I'm' seeing some tomato plants make good new regrowth. Of course, that regrowth is under attack from blister beetles and other pests that eat foliage. Gardening in our climate is not for sissies and requires great fortitude on the part of the gardener, as you well know! Dawn