Suzie,

Technically all squash have the capacity to be either winter or summer squash. Squash are considered summer squash when they are harvested young and, technically speaking, immature while their skin is still soft. They are prepared and eaten within days of being harvested. Winter squash are those which are left on the vine until the skin is very hard and the seeds are mature, and they can keep for months off the vine....which is how they earned the name 'winter squash'....because they'll keep until winter.

Spaghetti squash is in the Cucurbita pepo family and normally is used as a winter squash, but some people harvest the spaghetti squash fruit while they are young and small and cook them and eat them the same way they cook and eat the typical summer squash like yellow crookneck or yellow straightneck. You can plant spaghetti squash seeds in the ground anytime after soil temperatures have reached 60 degrees and daily high temps are staying at or above 65 degrees. A hybrid variety named Tivoli is one winter squash that a lot of people grow.

I understand why you are leery about planting squash because of its pest issues. To a certain extent I feel the same way, but we love to eat squash so I plant it anyway.

There are several things you can do to help you combat squash bugs. First of all, they overwinter in mulch and debris. If you use raised beds bordered with stone or wood, they often overwinter underneath or up against the woods or stones. You can seek them out and destroy them. If you have plant debris left from last year, squash bugs may be overwintering in it, and you may need to destroy it. If it has been on a compost pile, turn the pile often to bury any overwintering pests deep in the pile where, hopefully, its internal heat will destroy them.

While I generally don't worry much about crop rotation in a home garden, I do try to rotate my squash plants every year. If you plant this year's squash in the same place you grew last year's squash, that's just asking for trouble. My squash this year will be growing about 200' from where it grew last year. I realize most home gardeners don't have a garden plot large enough to rotate the squash very far, but moving it as far as you can from last year's area---even if you only move it 15 or 20' still is better than not moving it at all.

There are no good, solid, reliable organic controls for squash bugs (or squash vine borers either, which is a whole different can of worms). There is no magic bullet, no guaranteed way to kill them.

As organic gardeners, we just have to use all the methods we can to try to control them. In addition to rotation, this includes scouting plant leaves for eggs. If you can find and destroy the eggs before they hatch, you can lessen the damage a great deal. It sure is easier to scrape eggs off a leaf and squish them than it is to catch and destroy nymphs or adult bugs. You can use a hand-held vaccum (it needs to be a high-quality one with a lot of suction!) to suck up the bugs. I keep a bucket of soapy water handy and dump the bugs from the vacuum into it to drown. You can use a shop vac in the same way if your garden is close enough to an electrical source that you can run an extension cord to the vac. If you do that, if you'll put a few inches of water in the cannister of the shop vac before you start and put a couple of drops of dish soap in that water, the bugs will drown after they are sucked up into the shop vac, making them easier to dispose of after you're done. You can hand-pick and squish the nymphs and adult bugs (I hate doing this....if you grow a lot of squash it consumes a lot of your time) or flick them into a soapy bowl of water to drown.

While mulch is wonderful and beneficial in general, the squash bugs hide in it so you might consider mulching the ground under your squash plants with a couple of old boards. The bugs will crawl under the boards during the worst heat of the day and usually at night too. You can flip over the board and step on the bugs before they flee.

One pretty useful method is to make hoops of PVC pipe or electrical conduit and drape a lightweight floating row cover over the hoops. Secure it tightly to the ground. That will exclude the pests from your plants assuming there aren't any of them residing in the ground where you planted the squash. Once the flowers start to bloom, you'll have to remove the floating row cover so insects can pollinate the squash blossoms, or you can briefly lift the row cover, hand-pollinate the squash, and then replace the row cover.

I do not know of any organic pesticides that are effective on squash bugs, but there might be some....I've never tried any of them since I generally avoid all pesticides, even the organic ones, as much as possible.

I do a couple of other things to combat squash bugs and squash vine borers---in my garden, SVBs are a worse pest than the squash bugs. I plant buckwheat as a companion plant because it attracts beneficial insects that prey upon squash pests. I also plant nasturtiums and rat-tail radishes with my squash plants. I feel like both of them repel squash bugs. Last year I didn't see a single squash bug until either late July or early August, and I had planted both summer squash and winter squash in March since it was so hot so early. Some years I never see squash bugs and some years I see them as early as May. Squash vine borers, though, always show up sooner or later, except I didn't see any in 2011 so my squash lasted all summer...for as long as I kept watering it.

The best way I know to battle squash vine borers (because someone who is reading this discussion of squash bugs is likely thinking to themself "well, what do we do about the borers?") is to plant squash from the C. moschata family. While most C. moschata squash are normally grown and harvested as winter squash, some of them can be harvested young and small and used as summer squash. Tromboncino rampicante, often referred to as zuchetta, is one winter squash that normally is harvested young and used as summer squash. I've never had SVBs bother it, but squash bugs sometimes do.

This year I am trying two Asian squash, commonly called avocado squash, that are C. moschata and I am growing them as summer squash, not winter squash. That won't keep squash bugs from being an issue, perhaps, but it might mean that the SVBs won' bother them. Unfortunately, I don't know of any C. moschata that can be used as spaghetti squash, which is certainly a very unique squash.

I grew many, many, many squash of all kinds here for 6 or 8 years before the squash bugs and squash vine borers discovered we were growing them here. It was wonderful. I'd grow 20-30 different types per year. We had squash coming out of our ears and had the most incredibly gorgeous fall squash and pumpkin displays. Once the SVBs and squash bugs arrived en masse, I cut back growing C. pepo and C. maxima types and now grow mostly C. moschata types. You still may have squash bug issues with them but you won't have SVBs.

Some people have pretty good success spraying their squash plants with Surround WP (kaolin clay). I have had a 25-lb. bag (and I hate to admit this) of Surround WP sitting on my sunporch for at least 3 years and never have opened it and used it, though I had used Surround a couple of times when it first arrived on the market. It coats the plants and makes them roughly the same color as the squash bugs (which is sort of ironic, because it is harder to spot them!). The theory is that they don't like it and avoid plants sprayed with it. In the years I used it, it seemed to work but I hate the dusty gray look it gives to the plants, which is why I haven't used it. Also, I worry it might harm or repel the beneficial insects...and you know that I will not do anything that might harm beneficial insects which is why I rarely use even the organic pesticides.

I wish you luck with your spaghetti squash. You can grow it in spring or fall, and you may find you have fewer pest issues in fall although I wouldn't bet the bank on that.

Dawn

Thank you, Dawn, this is another post that I'm going to bookmark because it is so helpful! It's like a squash encyclopedia :-). Last year I did take a bucket of soapy water with me and put all the eggs and bugs in it that I could find/catch but it just wasn't enough. When we cleared the garden out all the old vegetation was put on the burn pile and eventually burned. I am following the crop rotation plan each year and planting things in different areas than the previous year, but with a garden the size of our it's not easy to move things very far. Mostly everything is just flipped around from the previous year.

Thank you again,
Suzie

Suzie,

You're welcome.

Dawn