rhizo - You are right about info on the web but plenty of good info on squash bugs is on the web and plenty of references about how they do not vector disease and about their life cycle. Also note that they are often mistaken for stink bugs, which can and do vector diseases. DAMAGE Squash bugs have piercing-sucking mouthparts that they use to suck the sap out of leaves. Their feeding causes yellow spots that eventually turn brown (fig. 6). The feeding also disrupts the flow of water and nutrients, which can cause wilting. However, unlike cucumber beetles, squash bugs do not vector diseases. Young plants are much more susceptible to damage and may die from extensive feeding. Larger, more vigorous plants are more tolerant of feeding damage, although they can also be injured or killed if they severely attacked. University of Minnesota Extension ------------------ Observation also plays a part. The majority of plant damage is done by the extremely large number of nymphs and their 5 stages of life that hatch from 1 pair of adults. The adults themselves are are in the last stages of their life cycle when they emerge from the mulch and debris in the spring. They feed but minimally so and even young plants can tolerate the feeding done by the average of 6-8 adults found on a plant. They then lay eggs and die. What the plants, until well established, canNOT tolerate is the thousands of young that hatch from the eggs those few adults lay unless one treats for them. This is not to say that you can't have more than the average number of adults on your plants, especially if you don't treat for them for several years and allow for a severe infestation to develop. But it is all the nymphs that will do in the plants. Dave

So when you originally posted were you seeking information on how to prevent the problem in the future or just posting a casual observation? That's what I assumed - looking for recommendations. If so then eliminating box elder trees, raking up and disposing of the tree droppings, and treatment with specific pesticides are the standard recommended solutions. And removal of that species of tree shouldn't be scoffed at. It has proven to be quite effective in many parts of the country according to several state extension studies that are published. Many aren't even aware that there is such a thing as a box elder tree, what they look like, and the role they play in the bug infestation. While it is true that the bugs can exist even without the trees they won't be in such excessive numbers. But if tree removal isn't an option for some reason then I guess all you can do is avoid planting the areas where they will normally congregate - like the south side of any structures. Or I guess if you had to plant in that area then you'd have to rig up some sort of plant cover or shelter to block excrement access to the plants. Dave

I can't help you with your squash issue but I do know that many of the ant poisons sold will kill a very wide range of insects, including benificial ones such as lady beetles. I'm having a really bad year battling the ants, mostly carpenter and bull ants, and hate using pesticides but I've come to the end of my rope. And I've discovered that the smaller varieties of ants are farming aphids on certain plants. I'm trying to find an ant poison that doesn't kill everything else in my yard.

Bon, You'd need to plant garbanzo beans in OK around the same time you plant snap peas or shelling peas. It would be best to start them indoors the same way Dorothy and I start our sugar snaps indoors because that would give you a 2-3 week jump on the growing season. Unfortunately, garbanzo beans take about a month longer than snap peas to produce pods of legumes, so your harvest still would be at the mercy of the weather. Still in a year when the last frost is early and you could get an extra-early start on the garbanzos, they might have a chance to produce. Unfortunately, they do not produce as heavily as peas do, per plant, so it would take a lot of plants. It takes time to succeed with gardening, but you learn more every day and get better and better at it over time. I started out decades ago with tomatoes, peppers, squash, lettuce and watermelons in a tiny backyard garden, and didn't add anything else until I had mastered those. Of course, my dad was a gardener as were many friends and relatives, so I'd been around it all my life which significantly shortened the learning curve. Actually, I've been thinking about that a lot lately---how much it helps if you had exposure to gardening as a child or young adult versus how little you know if you never were exposed to any of that and then you decided to plant your first garden. Seeing what new gardeners go through in terms of trying to figure out what to plant, how much to plant, etc. reminds me how lucky I was to see it when I was growing up. I will tell you a brief story that illustrates this, and I swear I am not laughing at this would-be gardener because there's not necessarily any way he would have know how corn grows: Because we give Christmas gift bags of canned goods (2-4 jars per bag depending on how good of a harvest year we had) to TIm's coworkers (125-150 people per year) and have done so for years, a lot of them have become intrigued with gardening and want to grow their own food and maybe learn to can it. They always come to Tim at work in spring or summer, full of plans and ideas, and with cell phone photos of their young gardens. Lacking experience, most plant too many plants too close together in too small of a space, but they learn from it and get better ever year. Recently one of those people was telling Tim all about his family's new garden and describing what they had planted, and his description left Tim speechless. They planted 1 corn plant. One. Tim had to break the news to him that one corn plant wouldn't feed a family. I kinda chuckled, but then thought about it and wondered if he thought it would grow like an apple tree and produce a whole lot of corn? What would a person think if they'd never grown anything before? How would they know you need a lot of corn plants to get a lot of corn and that the smallest number that might produce ears with good tip fill would be 4 plants, planted in a block, not in a straight row. It sure makes me grateful that I grew up around gardening so I had some sort of a clue. The folks at work consider Tim a garden expert even though he isn't even a gardener. (grin) He has learned a lot by osmosis, and he usually can answer their questions correctly, though he'll check with me on anything he's not sure of (and, increasingly, there's not many garden questions he is unsure of any more). They show him photos of their garden, and every now and then he'll show them photos on his cell phone that he took in our garden. The other day, I was stripping lower foliage with early blight off a Pruden's Purple tomato plant and uncovered an immense clump of very large green tomatoes. There were 3 or 4 that were really big and then others in various sizes. I shot a photo and sent it to Tim. (Until I stripped that foliage, you couldn't even tell the plant had set any fruit....and I don't like to stick my hands into dense foliage to check and see for fear of being snakebit.) Tim forwarded the photo to a fairly new gardener at work who has had a garden for a while now and is getting pretty good at growing, and he texted back and said something like "Oh, so you grow your pumpkins vertically." I thought that was hysterical. Tim told him they weren't pumpkins, but were big, green tomatoes. I was rolling on the ground laughing. But, you know, I do grow pumpkins vertically---it is just that those tomatoes weren't pumpkins. And, to be fair to that guy, those green tomatoes had a very oblate shape and could have resembled something like Cinderella pumpkins. Amy, I often use hay for mulch because old, spoiled hay is available, although I use it much less often than I used to because of the issues with herbicide carryover in mulch, compost and manure. However, I put a barrier (always) between the hay and the soil---sometimes it is weed block fabric, but more often it is cardboard or newspaper because they attract earthworms. Do I get more weeds than I would if I used straw? Sure I do, but the hay is free and straw is not---and the straw that is available usually is mixed with manure from horse or cow barns so I avoid it because of herbicide carryover. I just yank out weeds while tiny. I get the best results from summer squash plants that I plant early in spring and late in summer. The SVBs target the mid-summer ones too much. I'm a great gardener and keep up on weeding, mulching, etc. as long as the weather is nice. Once we start hitting the 100s? I become great at avoiding the garden in the heat. I run out there early in the morning, do the harvesting, and run indoors to escape the heat. That's when the pests and weeds start gaining the upper hand, but by then I am too hot to care. I'll go out in the evenings again if the weather is cooling off while we still have daylight. Generally this means that in fall, I have a lot of weeds to clear out, but I don't care. The older I get, the less I like being out in the heat of the day if I absolutely, positively don't have to be out there. Dawn