The "trunk" of a zucchini plant is dark green (when healthy), and solid. The stems of individual leaves are paler green and hollow. In my zucchini plants, the trunk can be anywhere from 5 to 10 inches long. To kill the larvae, you could pour some BT in there. I have never tried it though. I tried injecting with a meat injector but too often the liquid squirts out on the other side. Other people may have mastered their injector before mastering surgery, but if you have an open cut it can only help to pour some BT in it. I don't know how to catch adult borers. I saw one Sunday and tried to kill it but it was too fast for me (it was buzzing about and about, so it gave me plenty of chances). It is difficult for me to inspect leaves, specially when you have a number of winter squash sprawled over 10X10 ft.

Boy, I'm really confused. I *think* (or thought) this was a vine borer, but I've not actually seen the worm or pile of poo sawdust. I've seen a hole in a stalk. My main symptom has been morning wilt. The first day, I thought it needed water and I watered it well. It perked back up and that was that. But then next morning, it was wilted again, looking like it needed water. If this had been afternoon, I might have assumed it was from the heat of the sun. Now, I've been going out around noon every day and spritzing the whole plant - including a really healthy little fruit and beautiful blossoms - with Maxicrop (liquid seaweed, no iron). It perks back up in the afternoon. And today, I decided NOT to spritz just to see what happened...by afternoon, this guy looks just fine. It's just in the morning, poor thing is all drooped over, such a sad, sad sack. Could this be something else? I'm going to go post this in the curcurbit forum and see if anyone there might know as well, but could really use some knowledge. My experience with wilt and curcurbits has always been wilt=certain death. (Unless it's just wilted from not enough water) I don't get it.

The Bacillus thuringiensis is a bacterium and you need to get the right strain for it to work, and then you need to get it into the plants stem where the borer is ahead of the borer, and before the borer is too big for the BtK to work. If the vines do have borers in them there is no reason to rip out the affected plants, just squish the stem where the borer is and bury that stem which will root. Surround, a Kaolin clay product, is sprayed on the plant and disguises the plant so the moths do not recognize them and the stay away. Here is a link that might be useful: Squash Vine Borer Control

I have grown Tatume here a couple of times. While it outcompetes squash bugs, the squash vine borers still can kill it in a year when they are really bad. I don't grow it any more because we liked the flavor/texture of Seminole harvested young (baseball to softball-sized) better than Tatume. It is a huge space hog too, and because I already grow 6-10 kinds of C. moschatas most years, the last thing I need is a space hog that isn't as tasty as they are. Bon, I couldn't help noticing how many of my favorite Texas horticulturalists (Sam Cotner, Malcom Beck, Howard Garrett) were in Howard Garrett's story about Malcom's pumpkin. (Mr. Garrett and Mr. Beck write extensively on organic gardening and all their books are excellent, and Mr. Cotner wrote THE book on growing Vegetables in Texas. I've worn out 3 copies of it and am on my 4th.) Jay White, by the way, writes regularly for Texas Gardener magazine (as does Greg Grant) and their articles and columns are the first ones I read when a new magazine arrives. It is a well-known and well-understood phenomenon that healthy plants grown in healthy soil are more disease tolerant and more pest tolerant than less healthy plants. When pests relentlessly attack plants, I try to figure out what it is about those specific plants that make them less healthy and, therefore, more alluring to pests and to diseases. Sometimes it is obvious to me because the plants under attack are growing in less healthy soil. Sometimes it is something much more subtle---like cool-season plants that are beginning to be subjected to hotter temperatures than they like. Howard Garrett makes a convincing argument for us to grow our brassicas in the fall only in this part of the country because they have less pests since they are less stressed in cooler conditions---and I believe he is right about that. And, there are some pests, like grasshoppers, that relentlessly attack everything still green in the hot summer months, whether the plants are healthy and happy are not. So, for every "rule" that we observe, their is an exception, and I find grasshoppers to be one of the exceptions to the rule that healthy plants in healthy soil are not attacked by pests and diseases. I grew up eating yellow summer squash for as far back as I can remember and nothing I've ever grown as a more pest-tolerant substitute for it is 100% acceptable. When I want yellow squash, I simply want yellow squash---nothing else will do. So, in order to have it, I just grow it in low tunnel rows under row cover and hand-pollinate it. I feel like I don't have to settle for less in my own garden, and growing Tatume instead of the yellow squash I really want is, indeed, settling for less. You'll never know how you feel about Tatume until you grow it yourself. I just wasn't crazy about the flavor and didn't find it to be a really heavy producer either. To be fair to Tatume, it never will look like a heavy producer when it is grown adjacent to Seminole because Seminole outproduces it (and everything else) every single time. There is a reason Seminole is a perennial fave in our garden----it is beaten everything else for about 15 years now, and that track record is hard to break. It has been around forever....I can remember it being on seed racks in Texas when I was a child, although I think then it likely was sold as Calabacita, because that is the name that pops into my head every time I see a packet of the seeds. For squash vine borer tolerance or resistance, as George noted, C. moschatas will win every time and, for me, the C. agyrospermas like White Cushaw, Green-Striped Cushaw and Orange-Striped Cushaw are in second place. Tatume might come in third, or actually, a distant fourth behind every kind of yellow summer squash that exists when grown under row cover. YMMV. You can grow any squash or pumpkin you want if only you'll grow them under summerweight row cover, tulle netting, mosquito netting, etc. and hand-pollinate. Does it take longer and a bit more effort? Sure it does, but it is worth it to avoid the heartbreak of losing plants to the dastardly SVBs. Dawn