Insect Resistance cucurbits

General Discussions
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Several years ago I noticed an interesting phenomenon.

My gardening style has always been slightly (!?) chaotic, and this particular year I was letting my lettuce go to seed. It happened to be growing where I wanted a zucchini, so I just planted the zucchini in the patch of lettuce.

While plants four feet away were completely infested with squash bugs later in the season, this plant never had a single squash bug.

Life happened and I still haven’t had a chance to test it.

Last fall I bought a house in a completely new area. Since I don’t have an official garden, I planted straight into the grass, which is currently waist high. The squash patch, however, was planted on the edge of the woodchip piles and has grass only on the East.

This area has both squash bugs (which I am all too familiar with) and a new pest to me, the squash vine borer. As expected, the squash bugs found the squash mid season. I was hoping that with no one nearby planting squash I might get a reprieve, but unfortunately there are wild squash relatives in the area.

True to my foolhardy :slight_smile: determination, I didn’t chase them down and turn over every leaf in a vain effort to eradicate them. If I found them I got rid of them, but otherwise I tried not to stress it.

Currently the squash bugs are all through the squash patch, but only one plant is really being attacked. It had some kind of disease early in the season, so I assume it’s the weakest.

Cucurbits in other areas of the yard appear unaffected, surrounded by grass as they are.

Enter the squash vine borer. I’ve seen them, I’ve smashed one. I’ve watched for signs of frass on stems, but didn’t find anything until last week.

A larvae was digging into one of my canteloupe. I found another on one of my squash fruit, but in both cases nothing on the stems.

Then one of my pumpkins started dying and I pulled it. There were probably a dozen worms inside the stem. The interesting thing was that there were other pumpkins within a few feet that weren’t affected. All were planted in woodchips, without the protective grass “shield” of the other pumpkins (none of which were affected).

The main difference, and I think the one that made the difference, is that the dead pumpkin had a thick stem, more than an inch in diameter, and the others were much smaller.

So…for squash bugs, polyculture planting seems most effective. For vine borers, small vines and thorny, tough stems.

For both, polyculture, early planting, and late planting provided you have a long enough growing season.

It might also help that I have a thriving ecosystem out there, including a lot of spiders. Do spiders eat vine borers?

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I haven’t actually seen a borer moth in my garden, but I know they are in the area because they’ve attacked my zucchini and giant pumpkin I tried to grow.

I have a lot of hunter-type spiders in my garden. I almost always walk bare footed in my garden. I consider myself lucky that I have not been bitten by spiders before. They freak me out. I tolerate and even welcome them outside, but never indoors. I don’t have many web spiders. They are more creepy and I am more likely to not tolerate them for fear of walking in their web and getting tripped out.

Spiders and wasps have helped me out tremendously in the garden.

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We have a lot of black widows and wasps in our neighborhood. I’m a little concerned about them because they can harm humans, but so far, they mainly seem uninterested in me or my family.

I figure as long as they leave us alone, I can leave them alone and let them do their own thing. They’re possibly treacherous allies, but they are strong allies.

Actually, funny story. A few weeks ago, a total stranger called out to me and walked down my whole driveway in order to call me over from the back of the back yard in order to talk to him over the fence.

When I got to him, he said something like, “I’m an exterminator working the houses in your neighborhood. I know everybody has someone doing exterminating. Who do you go with?”

I knew exactly what he was trying to do, and I don’t like attempts to manipulate me, so I said brightly, “We’ve got a wild snake in our back yard! Isn’t that cool?”

And then I effused about how great the snake was at being an exterminator.

The man looked sulky. He said, “Okay, sorry for wasting your time.”

My husband laughed hard when I told him about that later.

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I never bothered to learn about snake varieties. If I see a snake, it gets clubbed on the head. There is a natural mistrust between snakes and humans that started in a garden:

“And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

I do plan to learn about the harmless varieties and tolerate those in the future.

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The one in my yard is a rubber boa. Totally harmless to humans. All the wild snakes in my area (except for cobras, which are easy to distinguish) are harmless to humans. If I lived in Australia, I might be a little more paranoid. :wink:

You know, a lot of people forget why the devil appeared in the form of a serpent in the Garden of Eden. The snake was a traditional symbol for Yahweh, which is why this scripture makes any sense:

Matthew 10: 16
Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

The serpent is not supposed to be a symbol of evil. Appearing in the guise of a serpent was similar to a wolf appearing in sheep’s clothing: trying to look innocent by disguising itself as something good.

I personally like snakes. I always have. They are beautiful and fascinating.

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Rubber boa of the garden hose family? :joy: We have some of those too, and garter snakes. Our poisonous ones are copper heads and rattlers, but they are rarely around a garden
Also, mind blown, i didn’t know about that side of the biblical snake/God connection at all!

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I haven’t seen any garter snakes here yet, but we saw them all the time when I was a kid in New Hampshire. It’s almost like there was an empty lot next door chock full of field mice for them to munch on. :wink:

I’ve been meaning to correct myself! We don’t have cobras here – we have rattlesnakes. Either way, of course, they’re easy to tell apart from everything else.

(Grin.) I know, isn’t that scriptural detail cool? It explains why Moses put a snake up on a pole for people to look at in order to be cured, too. It was a symbol of God’s power.

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My response to the exterminator salesman was, “If we have any problems, the spiders will take care of it.” His mouth sort-of gaped open for a second, then he turned and walked away without a word.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Squash Bug Resistance

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That’s hilarious! I love that!

It’s true, too!