so you are a lazy gardener and won't use any pesticide? Yeah, let the plants die.

You know what, you're right. Screw responsibility. Time to whip out my gallon bucket of Sevin and my trusty sprayer.

Kidding aside however, I've been going at it for the past three days squashing bugs with my finger. It's the tiny ones that are damn hard to get, the big ones are pretty much all gone. Cuke beetles are impossible, and as for SVB, I don't even have a clue. I gave my plants a spray of BT a month before due to caterpillars, so I guess it must of worn off.

Plus a really bad powdery mildew outbreak...fun

I use Safer spray when the squash bugs get too bad for handpicking.

You have to get it right on them though or it doesn't do much.

Here is a method to control cucumber beetles that anney, from this forum, published in a prior posting. I am copying and pasting rather than have you read a very long thread. At the bottom is info and a link about SVBs:

Posted by anney Georgia 8 (My Page) on Wed, Jun 24, 09 at 5:45
For those who might be interested, the rationale for this insecticide is to combine two ingredients, a cucumber beetle lure and a cucumber beetle poison. The lure must not attract any other insects to the poison.

The quickest insecticide using these principles to dispatch cuke beetles is to combine clove oil and dental disclosing tablets (made with red dye #28 -- no other red dye works) with water and set it around your plants.

Dissolve one tablet containing the red dye in a half-cup of water. Then mix 3 tablespoons of the dye mixture and one teaspoon of the clove oil and put it in a shallow non-plastic container like a jar lid or even a small metal catfood can so the cucumber beetles can feed on it. Set it in your garden or hang it about 24" high on your trellises. (Clove oil melts plastic so don't use plastic cups.) Save the rest of the dye mixture in the refrigerator and your clove oil separately. Replenish after rain or when it evaporates.

Female cucumber beetles are attracted by the volatiles in the clove oil and will flock to eat it -- but no other insects are attracted to it. The red dye that they ingest along with the clove oil is phototoxic, meaning that it causes a reaction when the insect is in sunlight, killing them in as little as five minutes.

You can replace the red dye #28 with Sevin if you don't have ready access to the red dye and don't mind going chemical. The Sevin does not go in your garden or on your plants, so you aren't contaminating your garden with it. It stays in its container, and it must eventually be discarded, so that's something to think about.

You can also use cucumber "boats" as your container. Just slice a cucumber the long way, scoop out some of the seeds, and soak them in the clove oil and dye mixture for several hours so they absorb them. Then set them around your garden. (They'll disintegrate in place with no harm done to anything.)

Cucumber beetles will decrease in number as the females die. Using this insecticide, I don't see any but one or two stray cuke beetles after a few days.
*************************

SVBs

As far as SVBs, if you are sure you have them (have you seen an entry hole and frass in the stem?) there are lots of postings here on how to attempt to treat it using Bt injected into the stem after retrieving the SVB larvae from within the stem. Here is a link someone published previously by a forum member which explains how (see "Management"). And there are lots of postings about this if you search 'SVB' here at the bottom of the page.

Here is a link that might be useful: SVB info

Can anything be done about the cuke beetles eating roots? They're decimating my cukes and pumpkins. I'm going to use the red dye and clove method to work on the adults, but is there any non-pesticide way of knocking off the larve that are eating my roots?

thank you