Boo--I have a friend in New Mexico who *swears* she has found the cure for wilt LOL! Not ure if it works, but it is worth a try, right? She takes 3-4 tea bags, brews a strong dark tea, dilutes it to quarter-strength with water and feeds it to the ailing plants. she says she has brought back multiple plants this way. Worth a try, since the bugs are bothering your plants.

Christine- I put zone 9b because when it gets cold here my yard doesn't get as much damage as the rest of the city. We have a fence in our backyard, and I think that helps keep out the wind and protect the plants. This winter our philodendron was hardly bothered by the cold, only some tiny brown spots on a couple leaves. I have been watering a bit more, and that is really helping :-) Thanks!!! I spray every 10 days with thuricide to battle the caterpillars. I've been harvesting several yellow squash and zucchini every day for the past week. Here is the list of everything I have growing: Sunflower-Mammoth Pole Beans- Blue Lake, Kentucky Wonder, & Kentucky Blue Sweet Corn- Sugar Buns Hybrid, Bi-Licious Hybrid, Early & Often Hybrid, and SugarPearl Hybrid Tomatoes- Better Boy Hybrid, Burpee's Big Boy Hybid, Roma, Super Sweet 100 Hybrid Cucumber- Bush Champion, Early Pride Hybrid Bell Peppers- Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Purple, Brown, Ivory (I tossed the variety seed packet since it was empty, before I wrote down the actual names) Yellow Squash- Enterprise hybrid, Pic-N-Pic Hybrid Zucchini- Sable Beauty Hybrid, Burpee's Fordhook Spaghetti Squash- Small Wonder Orange Acorn Squash (seeds saved from squash purchased at Publix, so hopefully it will still be orange acorn squash, but you never know!) Cantaloupe- Hearts of Gold Butternut Squash-Waltham Watermelon- Bush Sugar Baby Pumpkins- Jack Be Little, Early Sweet Sugar Pie, Howden ~Kat~

> the dubious acorn zucchini hybrid you refer to is > probably my post in the veggie forum Whoops. My mistake. Profuse apologies. All I knew was that 'C' was for Curcubit. I thought all summer varieties were interfruitful, and all winter varieties would be interfruitful, but never the two types together. Wrong on all counts. It seems very strange to me this year that my Zukes, Buttersticks and Hubbards all put out female flowers well in advance of any male flowers. My Butternuts have not blossomed yet, but I remember last year's Butternuts having male flowers excruciatingly long before the females.

The whiteish fuzzy stuff may not have anything at all to do with what caused the problem although the Squash Bugs, or probably the Squash Vine Borer, is a better choice. That fuzz may be a fungus that is converting the now dead plant material into something the soil can put to use. Talk with the people at your local office of the University of Delaware Cooperative Extension Service since they will have a better handle on particular plant problems in your area of the world. Here is a link that might be useful: University of Delaware CES