Help! Squash bugs!
countrysmiths
16 years ago
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barton
16 years agolast modified: 9 years agoRelated Discussions
Wood Ashes for Squash Bugs
Comments (5)From my research, dusting with wood ash is an old school treatment for the Squash Vine Borer. The theory is that they don't recognise the texture of the vine & move on. I've read online that dusting with flour will deter squash bugs, but I've never tried it. Same with intercropping with mint. I plant buckwheat to attract squash bug predators. (The tachinid fly.) It works well. I've found dead squash bugs and have seen the flies patrolling. But once you do it, you're committed to going organic & letting the bugs do their thing....See MoreSquash Bugs--and Surround
Comments (4)I will check into this one. I have never heard of it before. It seems there is a lot I have never heard of!...See MoreHelp! Squash bugs are here!
Comments (43)As soon as I see any eggs or adults I start a daily patrol I take some masking or duct tape and use the sticky side to pull the eggs off the leaves check both sides of the leaves I also have a pump spray bottle with soapy water to spray any adults or nymphs kills them in a few minutes , Once a week I use my hose end sprayer ( the kind with a mixing tank on it and use a strong soapy mix and soap the entire patch I make a lot of suds and soak it in ( I call it nuking the squash ) I also put some flat boards around each hill as they like to hide there at night and can be collected after dark or early in the A.M. it also helps to have no mulch they can hide in I use black plastic. It can be a battle but you can control them . Good Luck...See MorePlease help with planting dates
Comments (11)I sow pumpkin seeds by hand because I don't space them very close together. How close you can space them depends on the variety and the vine's ultimate size, how fertile your soil is, how much moisture you have, etc. I actually get away with planting Seminole more closely than other varieties because I let them climb the garden fence, which is 8' tall. For me, Seminole is an end-of-the-season space filler that I often plant at mid-summer as other crops are coming out, so the spacing depends on what space is available. One Seminole pumpkin, for example, can put out vines that run 15-30' in all directions when there is fairly fertile soil and adequate moisture available. If you plant too many pumpkins they will climb all over each other and every other plant you are growing, so take it easy with the pumpkin spacing. You can crowd some plants and get away with it (I plant tomato plants closer than I should in order to get huge harvests all at one time for a very intense/heavy canning period of 1-2 months, for example) but with rampant vining plants, too many plants in too small of a space can backfire on you by burying everything else you're growing underneath their foliage. Unless I am planting pumpkins to trellis up a fence (my Seminoles usually climb the fence and then, if I have planted them near a fence line that has trees beyond it, they'll climb the trees), I space them 6-8' apart. If I am letting them climb the fence I space them as closely as 1' apart along the fence, but that is because their growth will be mostly vertical, and when the vines try to head off in multiple directions on the ground, I train them to climb the fence. You cannot grow big huge pumpkin varieties on fences or trellises, but Seminole grows just fine that way. With varieties that produce larger pumpkins, the vines have got to have enough ground and water to supply the rapidly enlarging vines and pumpkins with adequate nutrients and water. Otherwise, you'll end up with a lot of vines but with a poor harvest because all of them are fighting each other for the available nutrients and moisture. A pumpkin variety like Small Sugar Pumpkin can produce well, as Seminole does, with somewhat closer spacing but a pumpkin variety that produces larger pumpkins needs larger spacing. Read the variety description for whatever variety you're going to grow and base your spacing on what is recommended for that variety. If you plant too many vines too close together, poor air flow also can aid in the development of foliar diseases that can kill your plants before you get a single pumpkin. You have to think about your spacing in terms of what gives you a healthy, happy plant and not in terms of what will give you the most pumpkins. Planting too many plants too close together will backfire and will give you a poor harvest, especially here with our heat and humidity but often low rainfall in the summer months. Pumpkin vines (and all vining winter squash varieties) need a lot of water to maintain the rapid growth of the large leaves. That water does not necessarily fall from the skies here in July and August at a high enough rate for the pumpkins/winter squash to get the kind of growth they need, so be prepared to irrigate. Drip irrigation or soaker hoses are both because they put the moisture in the ground for the plant roots and not up on the foliage where fungal diseases then will grow. In 2011, which was a painfully hot and dry year, I planted Seminole pumpkins in two different areas, where they were interplanted with sweet corn. With very little rainfall (about 12" total from January through late August), the plants had to fight for survival. I watered them as well as I could, but the extreme heat (high temps above 100 for about 90 days and often above 110 for a shockingly long period of time in July and August) kept their growth limited. When rainfall returned near the end of August and we then had good autumn rainfall in Sept and Oct, the vines took over about 1000 square feet of space and produced a very bountiful harvest just before frost. I think I had 4 to 6 Seminole plants that survived the drought and heat long enough to fill up that 1000 s.f. area. They climbed their trellis, they climbed all the corn plants, they climbed the fence, they ran out into the dry pastures of dead or dormant grasses beyond the fence, they filled up the dry retention pond bottom, they climbed about 100 tomato cages whose plants had long since perished in the drought. Get the picture? Those plants were spaced 8' apart that year. In a dry year, I space them further apart so they don't have to fight each other as much for moisture. I watered very heavily in June, July and August just to keep them alive. It was so hot for most of the summer that a person driving by and looking at the stunted plants likely would have thought I wasn't watering them at all, but I was watering very heavily about 3 times a week. The abnormal heat was just sucking all the moisture out of the ground and the plants struggled to survive. If you plant too many of a vigorously vining C. moschata type, it will bury everything underneath it on its rush to world domination when it has adequate moisture, but some years it is very hard to give them adequate moisture. With any variety that is not C . moschata, in our climate that sort of crazy, rampant growth is rare because usually the squash vine borers kill it before it can get big enough to spread out and really grow (or produce a single pumpkin). However, I grew many varieties of C. pepo and C. maxima for 6 or 7 years before the squash vine borers discovered we had moved here and planted a garden. It was great while it lasted, but once the SVBs found us, I switched mostly to C moschatas. Every now and then I'll grow green-striped cushaw, which has some tolerance of SVBs, or one of the warted pumpkins like Knucklehead, but I have to fight the SVBs hard just to get a pumpkin or two from Knucklehead. So, if it sounds like I am encouraging you to use wider spacing, I am. Planting too many of these monster pumpkin vines will give you fewer, smaller pumpkins, not more of them. If you have too many pumpkins on too many vines fighting for too little moisture, you run the risk of losing the whole crop unless you have an endless supply of water. It is always better to start small with just a couple of pumpkin vines, and see how that goes your first year or two. Once you learn how much space they need to grow and produce, then in another year you can plant more. Planting too many in your first attempt at growing them almost always ends in disappointment. I had been gardening for 15 years as an adult (and even longer as a child in a gardening family) before I ever planted a single pumpkin plant in my own garden because my city garden before we moved here was too shady for them and too small. Because I was a very experienced gardener, I understood what kind of spacing to use. I had grown some of the mini-pumpkins, like Jack-B-Little, back in Fort Worth, but those are tiny pumpkins that are easy to trellis. I am worried you're going to plant way too many plants and ruin your own chance of getting a nice harvest....See Morecountrysmiths
16 years agolast modified: 9 years agobarton
16 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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9 years agolast modified: 9 years agochickencoupe
9 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
9 years agolast modified: 9 years agochickencoupe
9 years agolast modified: 9 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
9 years agolast modified: 9 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
9 years agolast modified: 9 years agochickencoupe
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