Update that marigolds and nasturtiums without flowers did not repel the svb,neither did my homemade concoction of tobacco, redpeppers, black pepper, vegetable oil, and dish soap. It rained a few hours after I applied it, today new eggs all over them. I'm giving up organic at least with the svb, trying stuff with methoxychor, or best I've heard yet is this: "A second planting of summer squash made in early July will mature after adult borers have finished laying eggs. " Another nice suggestion: "Mulches are known to harbor squash bugs" http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/squash_pest.html "Iowa State University Organics Research Program conducted trials of various control methods for squash bug and squash vine borer. Researchers found that mulching with newspaper and hay, combined with tightly secured row covers on the plots (a level 2 control), provided very effective control of both weeds and squash bugs in pumpkin (C. pepo)Âespecially in the wet season of 2002.(4, 5) The row covers apparently excluded squash bugs, preventing them from entering to lay eggs. Gauze row covers (e.g., ReemayÂ, AgriforceÂ, AgribonÂ, TufbellÂ) [Section 205.206(b)(1),(2),(3)] physically exclude pests and prevent them from reaching the plants in large numbers. Preventive strategies have become more important with recognition of A. tristis as a probable disease vector. Hand picking and trapping of A. tristis, or slitting each vine to remove the larva, in the case of M. satyriniformis, represent attempts to control pests after they have begun rearing another generation in numbers sufficient to cause economic damage and pest buildup. Such labor-intensive controls may be uneconomical for large plantings." "Some products acceptable in organic vegetable production that are effective against squash bugs include diatomaceous earth, sabodilla, and neem oil. Growers that anticipate using materials to control heavy pest infestations must list these materials and the circumstances for their use in their organic systems plan. This plan must be submitted to and approved by the organic certifier before the producer uses any material." What is a sabodilla? I found a tree by that name, is it the same thing? Here is a link that might be useful: svb info

You're in a nice hot zone, so you can continue growing. This means maybe some flowers that attract beneficials in the soil. I let go a few wild goldenrods in my garden hoping to attract more ground beetles, they eat the larvae. Do you have squash bugs or squash vine borer? Those are especially good for squash vine borers. Also a lizard or bird is good, put a nice water fountain to attract lots of beneficials. You can go the roundup method, some do this at the beginning of growing season only or at the end, maybe both, but it will kill anything, not organic. Even your worms can say goodbye with this. Pyrethrin daisies, painted daisies, and shasta daisies have pyrethrin oil in the flower, so you are in a zone that still can grow something all year even. Daisies should grow very nicely in your bed. These daisies are used to make the professional pyrethrum sold in stores as insecticides, good on squash bugs, not sure on squash vine borers, it's the oil from the blooms, not the roots or leaves. Potash with meat grease, or actually lye, will soften the backs of the squash bugs, the pyrethrum will seep into them and kill. A double whammy! Then with the ground beetles, lizards, birds, and what ever else beneficials attracted to a water fountain, will kill anything else. You want so far as I've learned just a week ago by a few posters with some proven effectiveness , to let parsley flower, maybe even cilantro, and dill, pennyroyal, and mints to attract lots of parasitic wasps. You can work the area over until next year to have nothing there in your soil. Then more recently I read of soil solarization, cover your area in clear plastic for a few months with blazing hot weather, it kills everything too, so any worms might not make it, but maybe they will have time to run. There's lots of talk about lights attracting svb, so a bug lamp or a bright solar lit yellow light might be all you need. The frogs will come to eat what's leftover on the ground, so another double whammy.

The sub-pic with the most circled are of feeder roots an Atlantic Giant pumpkin puts out at each node if buried or touching the soil... the vine was repositioned and the roots got exposed/uncovered... the pic's a little blurry but it goes to show they even laid eggs on the roots! The top sectional pic, three circled, is a vein/rib on the underside of a leaf. Your question about just sacrificing the leaf: The leaf stem is hollow, they get inside and head downward to the base of the stalk and will try boring into the vine. Don't believe what you hear about they aim for the first 3 feet of the vine! On an AG pumpkin, I've even found eggs on the yet-to-unfurl ends of vines at 20+ feet from the stump. The new growth with all the "to-be" vines at the end is "tender vittles" to them--softer & easier to bore into. And the leaf underside vein/rib [on that AG pumpkin] was about 24-30" above the ground. The right sectional pic with 1 egg on the stalk was up about 5-6 inches from the ground. There are maybe 2 possible ways to use the floating row cover successfully. 1. Use a plastic or heavy fabric weed barrier over the ground with the hole for the plant relatively small and in a different area than previous years PLUS use a floating row cover or screen over the plant, completely sealed along the edges, and hand pollinate when flowers are seen and immediately recover/reseal. The weed barrier would prevent them from emerging from the soil under the row cover, and if the stump hole or slit in the weed barrier is small and in a different location they may never find the opening--kinda like a person falling thru the ice in a lake and getting disoriented where the hole is if a current moves you further away. 2. Maybe silly or too much work would be to use row cover cut into long strips (like a roll of it 3-5" wide) and wrap it around the vine as it grows, kinda like you'd wrap electrical tape around a wire or wiring harness, always overlapping. You can do this on leaf stalks too, but it all seems like too much work, plus may constrict the plant's growth as the vine thickens. In theory, doesn't sound bad, but in reality, nearly impossible to do. Others say use tin foil and just form it around the vine. I don't think any kind of direct contact cloth or foil is really practical--they may just move to a different part of the plant not covered completely. AG growers often cover the vines with soil about an inch or more deep... it provides extra rooting areas too..but you still have to worry about exposed stalks & leaves, plus you must insure you're not burying a part of the vine that already has eggs deposited. Mark

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