Hi, Welcome to the forum. We are happy to have you here. We have folks posting here from many states and we're always happy to have new friends. Residence in Oklahoma is not required! : )

Familiar with them? They are the bane of our existence, as I am sure you would agree.

In each case, good sanitation and garden cleanup is required. Whatever you do, don't compost plants with heavy insect infestations because the pests may overwinter in or on the edges of your compost pile. I bag them up in black trash bags (thick, heavy duty ones like lawn and leaf bags), tie them tightly closed and haul them to the dump with the rest of our trash. (We're really rural and could burn them, but I absolutely would not burn any brush piles in the current conditions nor would I encourage anyone else to do so while fire danger remains so very high).

Spider mites are very hard to control and to prevent from over-wintering. The female mites overwinter both in the soil and also in cracks and crevices in bark. If you have raised beds made with wood edging, they can overwinter in cracks and crevices in that wood, or underneath it. One method that might help you knock back their population would be to spray tree trunks and woody trunks and limbs of small trees and shrubs with dormant oil during the dormant season.

Spider mites thrive in dry conditions but don't do as well in wet conditions. If your winter is very dry, it wouldn't hurt to water your garden soil once or twice a month with a nice deep watering. It likely will kill some of the spider mites.

The time to vigorously attack them will be next spring as soon as you have the slightest inkling that they are around. I had them popping up on potted brugmansias on the patio in either late February or early March this year and I pretty much ignored them for a while because I didn't think the discolored foliage possibly could be spider mites. By the time I actually flipped over a leaf and found spider mites everywhere on the underside of that leaf, the spider mite population was huge. This year I will spray the brugmansias with dormant oil in winter and then with neem regularly after that.

Many of the best spider mite solutions cannot be sprayed on our tender vegetable plants in hot temperatures (over 90 degrees) because they can cause leaf damage and even plant death, so aggressively tackling the spider mites by spraying the plants in spring when temperatures are still below 90 degrees will go a long way towards controlling them. Also, be careful what you choose to use and don't mix spraying with oil-based products with spraying with sulphur because the two together (even if you use them separately within a few days) will kill plants.

You also can buy and release spider mite predators in spring to get control of the population before summer's heat arrives. They are available from places like Arbico. Research each potential beneficial insect/spider mite predator before you buy and be sure you're releasing them at the right time. Some of them can live/work only under very specific temperatures and relative humidities.

With the SVBs, what works best for me is to put hoops made f from either PVC or electrical conduits over the rows of squash and to put floating row cover (like Agribon or Reemay) over those hoops, and secure it to the ground. This excludes squash bugs and SVBs by preventing them from reaching your plants. There's a couple of ways you can do it. You can keep the covers over them "forever" and hand-pollinate your own squash plants in the early morning hours. This is the most effective method and will keep your squash producing all summer as long as disease doesn't strike. The other way is to keep them covered until they begin flowering, and then remove the cover and hope for the best. Usually, when you do this, the pests eventually find your plants eventually, but hopefully by then you'll have had some squash mature that you can harvest and use.

Some people cut some of the floating row cover fabric into long strips (sort of like gauze bandages if you can picture that) and wrap the stems of their plants to help exclude SVBs. This is not a 100% failsafe solution, but it helps. I have used knee-high stocking with the toe area cut out to do the same thing, and some people use aluminum foil. All of these work best if you get the end of the wrapping material into the ground a couple of inches so the borers cannot enter the plant just below the soil level. None of these will necessarily keep the SVBs out forever, but every little bit helps.

Because you have neighbors who allow these pests to essentially breed and live in your area, you'll have the best success in future years with using floating row cover. I don't know if there is anything you can do to save your plants at this point. You might try either a summerweight dormant oil or neem oil sprayed on ONE plant as a test. The good thing is that it ought to smother the eggs. The bad thing is that these products can burn foliage if used in extreme temperatures like you and we have now. If you want to try it on one sacrificial plant, spray it, wait 24 to 48 hours to see if foliar burn appears on the foliage and then, if you are satisfied it is safe for the plants, proceed and spray the rest of your plants.

Did the SVBs eventually get into your Long of Naples moschata? For winter squash, I pretty much only grow C. Moschata and of all the ones I've grown, 'Seminole' (available from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange among other places) has been the most SVB-resistant. This year I haven't had much of an SVB issue until the last two weeks, but my Seminole, Corn Field Pumpkin and 'Tahitian Melon' (a C. moschata winter squash, not actually a melon) remain unscathed so far, and they are not even covered with floating row cover.

I am so sorry I cannot offer any guarantee solutions that will sae your melons and squash. I would be incredibly frustrated were I in your shoes.....which is why I started using floating row cover quite a few years back. I don't know that I have neighboring gardeners who allow the SVBs to thrive on their property, but we have a form of native squash (inedible) that grows wild here and is quite abundant in unmowed areas and in wildlife management land along the Red River and I suspect the SVBs infest it which enables them to thrive and then spread to home gardens.

Because the infestation is so wide-spread in your area this year, you can expect to see them early and often next year. That's just a fact of life. Be sure to plant your squash and melons in a new area where no squash and melons grew this year and cover them with floating row cover. That, along with any other protection method you use will help a lot.

If you haven't read about injecting squash vines with Bt or Spinosad via a syringe in an effort to kill whatever borer grubs make it inside your plants, you might want to go to the vegetable forum and do a search on that topic and read what some folks do. Their success varies. I've never tried it. I have a big garden and too little time and I've never been interested in spending part of my summer (especially insanely hot summers) injecting my plants with anything when I can largely avoid the problem with floating row cover.

Next year, I'd use every IPM technique possible in an effort to defeat the SVBs and squash bugs.

With spider mites. the time to do battle is spring. In the summer, most of what you could spray will damage the plants so you find yourself in a can't-win situation there.

As bad as the spider mites have been here, I've had a great harvest off the plants they infested. I believe my spider mite levels are dropping as I'm' seeing some tomato plants make good new regrowth. Of course, that regrowth is under attack from blister beetles and other pests that eat foliage. Gardening in our climate is not for sissies and requires great fortitude on the part of the gardener, as you well know!

Dawn

Wow, Dawn, thank you for so many words. I had never even though of battling the mites in Spring instead scratching my head thinking "It's 106F how am I supposed to spray for these things?". I didn't recognize the damage from the mites (thought it was stink bugs because they were hanging out on my beans) until I saw webbing and by then they were on everything except my peppers and blueberries. And I was always reluctant to spray the plants with water because of the "don't overhead water!!" that I see everywhere. ;)

The SVBs did get into a stem of my Moschata, but it was only a leaf stem; I saw a yellowing leaf two days ago in the middle of a bunch of green ones so I investigated. I think it took several of them to chew their way in because a large space along the stem had been gnawed. I removed the leaf with the borers inside, set it in a wastebasket, put a spare storm window over it and left it in the sun (which is what I've been doing with diseased/infested plant parts this hot Summer. But I think BT injections are the only reason I still have cucurbits.

I'm not sure wrapping my cucurbit stems will help much with the SVBs as they're laying most of their eggs on the leaves and stems, not the vines; my 'long of naples' moschata ends up with around 15 eggs on top of the leaves around where it connects to the stem but the eggs don't stick well to the surface so the wind blows them everywhere. I think row covers all year will have to be the solution.

Again, thank you for taking the time to type all of that out for me; it's been very helpful and gives me hope for next year.

Next year will be my third year of gardening... looks like I picked the worst two years to start, eh? ;)

Karlie, I started my very first garden, too late, in June last year. I picked a vewy bad year. I suppose some would say this year is the worst to start in. Truly, the persistent triple digits last year was phenomenal. I was clueless while digging and watering away. rofl I pretty much destroyed a lot of soil, too. I was able to remedy much of it through some serious composting this year, though.

bon

Heh, yeah. Last year I was watering conservatively following the "don't over-water" rule. Surely my tomatoes would wilt if they were thirsty, right? No, they just turned brown and dry and I still didn't know they were thirsty.

Karlie,

You're welcome. Those mites are sneaky. They show up really early and we don't really notice them. So, they get really busy reproducing, and the hotter it gets, the faster they reproduce. (Really!) By the time we are noticing them, they are producing a new generation in as little as 5 days I think, and the baby females are born already pregnant! One female spider mite can produce up to a million offspring in one season. That's why they are hard to defeat.

Next year, when I first notice them showing up, I'll be sure to post a thread and mention it here. I am very far south in OK (almost in Texas) and I should see them before folks further north see them.

Some plants don't mind being sprayed with water, but with others (like tomatoes) constant moisture on the foliage can cause disease issues. I try to avoid getting moisture on my tomato foliage as much as possible.

It sounds like you're dealing with the SVBs and their eggs about as well as anyone can under these conditions.

Look at it this way. After starting your gardening career in 2011 and 2012, when we actually have a "normal" (whatever that is) year in this part of the country with normal temperatures and normal rainfall, gardening will seem incredibly easy!

Don't be afraid to stick your finger into the soil to check to see if it is moist, or to dig down with a trowel. After you have a few years of gardening under your belt, you'll know when your plants are heat-stressed or drought-stressed just by their appearance, and in the same way you'll know from looking at them whey they are dry. It is hard when you've started in dry years and don't have a wet year for comparison. It will get easier. (It's hard to imagine it would get much harder than last year and this year.)

Happy Growing,

Dawn

Wasn't there someone here who did "layering" with vining squash plants that they allowed to run along the ground? Don't know if you can do that or not, Karlie, but it seemed like a good alternative to me. She rooted her plants by the layering method along the ground and if an SVB got into a section of the vine, she could cut it off and out and continue growing the vine from the newly rooted portion. Not sure I explained that very well, and maybe that person will be along to better describe how they did it.

I have not had any SVBs yet - knock on wood. I live in OKC, heavily populated area, and I cross my fingers, pray, threaten, cast spells, do mojo, and whatever, that the SVBs won't find me. I do get the bugs, tho, and I check the back of the foliage to find and destroy eggs.

BTW, I am originally from SE Kansas, Neodesha/Independence. My sister and brother still live in Neodesha and mom lives in Independence. Pittsburg would be more heavily populated than those towns. I do like that part of Kansas, those, because it is prettier than Western Kansas IMHO.

Susan

Susan,

Lots of people layer. All you do is pile up soil over parts of the vine laying on the ground. I usually don't bother layering because my vines tend to put roots down into the soil as they roam around anyway.

Layering can be helpful if used like a band-aid over a portion of the vine where you've slit a stem and removed one or more SVB grubs from the stem. In this case, piling dirt on top of the wounded area kinds of seals it off and prevents pests and diseases from entering through the slit stem.

Once SVBs are widespread in any given area, it is hard to defeat them if you're raising plants not covered by row cover because they are very persistent since the survival of their species hinges on them laying eggs that hatch and produce the next generation.

I had a good year last year and never saw a one, but we've got them now. I've only seen a tiny number of squash bugs and the beneficial insects have apparently taken care of them. Even though I've seen them, they aren't on my plants at the present time and haven't damaged any enough to kill them.

On the other hand, not watering the squash plants is killing them, and rather quickly in this heat.

Dawn

Oh, gosh, Dawn, if any of my veggies survive this heat, I'll faint! Well, I may faint anyway just from the heat!

I see your point. Poor squash. I don't know if mine will make it either. It's just too darned hot to bend over and check my leaves and stems daily. I ordered some "cooling cloths" - we'll see if they work some.

Susan

I've covered the moschata in a few places along the vine and it's also rooted through the mulch on its own. I think the other squash and melons have rooted also but I kind of crowded everything (I let someone talk me into it) so I can't really get in there to look, but I see melons and squash hanging out in the bed waiting to get ripe.

And just to let you know the overplanting/crowding crime I have committed (no laughing at the newbie!), in 1 single 12x4 1' deep bed I have:

1 Long of Naples
2 honeydew (some seeds we saved from a fantastic melon we came across in a grocery store)
2 Ha'ogen melon
1 Delicata Squash
1 Green Nutmeg Melon
1 Waltham Butternut

Of course the Long of Naples and the Waltham Butternut are on the ends and their vines aren't actually in the bed (the long of Naples has spread 30' in many directions).

Yep, I let someone talk me into that.

Susan, You know, there's just a point where it is not cost effective to water anymore. I've been trying to keep the peppers, okra, melons and winter squash watered so they could continue to produce, but I think I'm done with that now. I may not even water my young southern peas or bush beans I've planted for fall. The temperatures are so ridiculous and my energy is just all gone.

It was 112 degrees here today, our fifth consecutive day of 110 or higher at our house, though it has been consistently 2-3 or even 5 degrees cooler at our Mesonet station, making me wish I lived there at times.

At this point, I could water enough to keep them alive, but likely not producing. I think I'll just stop and let them go. Some of the melons will ripen, but others are still too small. I just don't want to spend more on water than the value of what I would harvest. Even the okra is wilting and looking unhappy and it generally tolerates heat pretty well. We think of it as drought-tolerant,but it is not tolerant of the kind of drought we're having this year.

Tomorrow night when they run the update, my county's KBDI will surpass 600 which is usually when I stop trying to keep anything producing. So, it is time. The okra and winter squash may hang on another week or two, but without consistent water the melon vines will wilt really fast and any melons not harvested will sunburn. Maybe I can salvage them by feeding them to the chickens. The peppers have struggled these last two weeks with temps consistently over 108, and we've had a good harvest. Would I have liked to keep them going into fall? Sure, but not at what it would take in $$$ spent for water.

Karlie, I'm the queen of overplanting, so you cannot shock me. I let all my watermelons, Armenian cukes, Seminole pumpkins, butternut squash, cantaloupes, pickling cucumbers and gourds grow on trellises and fences which lets me get great use of the space I have. However, they also escape from their intended area and run wild throughout the garden giving me a big mess of a jungle by July. This year they've taken over the space allotted for summer squash, late-season corn, two rows of tomatoes, and a lot of pole beans. Whichever plants outwit and outlast the others gets to dominate the space and win the game (as long as it it producing a harvest). This year morning glories and cardinal climber came up in the midst of all of it and joined in the fun.

Harvesting is a little tricky as I have to avoid stepping on the escaped vines that roam everywhere, but if I step on a vine and crush it and kill it, who cares? It outgrew its space anyway so stepping on it and killing it is probably inevitable at some point and I just think of it as late pruning.

I live in a wild area with abundant wildlife including venomous snakes and I know they come into my garden. When it is a wild jungle, I'm less likely to see them which, oddly, works for me. If I cannot see them, I won't get scared and flee back into the house. (Don't examine the logic behind this too deeply....and, yes, I know that the venomous snakes I don't see might bite me, but it hasn't happened yet, so I am not likely to rein in the jungle until it does.)

I happen to love vining plants that go every which way. When you harvest, it is sort of like hunting for Easter eggs, and that keeps it interesting.

Who says gardens have to be neat, tidy, precise little rows of perfect plants. In my garden, every square inch that isn't heavily mulched or heavily shaded by plants will sprout weeds, so the more I plant, the less bare ground I have and the less weeding I have to worry about.

Dawn