I have tried hand picking, egg squashing, companion planting, row covers, spraying with tobacco tea (which works great for aphids and many other pests) and planting sacrificial plants, but nothing helps. The squash bugs can carry disease, so it is not necessarily the amount of actual leave damage that kills the plant. I am an organic gardener. Any suggestions?
I can’t help you at all, but I just want to mention that I find it fascinating that you use the word “squash” in two completely different senses in your post, once as a verb and once as a noun. At first I interpreted your thread title as an imperative sentence.
Assuming you speak of the so-called ‘stink bugs’ and not the squash-borer proper, you can use Neem oil (diluted, and worked well for me), plus you can help keep the numbers down by laying newspapers or such around plant and killing them in morning while they are still hiding.
Also, diatomaceous earth works well, IME. Just powder-up both sides of leaves/stalks and you should see reduction.
Here’s a decent source backing me, fwiw.
I don’t know about squash bugs specifically, but my mom’s community garden struggled for years against bean beetles, until they found the one thing that could deal with them: Late planting. If you don’t plant beans at all until the summer solstice, then the beetles who wintered over starve before there’s any bean plants for them to eat. Obviously, this would only work for pests that have a highly-specific diet, and I don’t know where your squash bugs fall on that scale.
In my experience, late planting helps reduce the damage of worms in sweet corn.
I am also an organic gardener and have an intense hatred for squash vine borers.
I inject the stems directly with Hb nematodes, sold under the brand name NemaSeek. It is the only preventative measure that I’ve found to work consistently. I also apply BTK and adding diatomaceous earth is probably not a bad idea either, as per Ionizer’s post.
You can buy lady bugs by the bag (hundreds, thousands, however many you are willing to pay for.) They wouldn’t be a threat to an adult squash bug, but they might possibly eat the eggs. (You’d have to research to confirm that, though.)
I’m not sure why the row covers wouldn’t work, if enough effort is made to seal out entry by the bugs (a pain to be sure).
I have fortunately not dealt with this problem, but if all the “organic” solutions did not work I’d either try the least evil kemikulz or stop growing squash.
*I try to minimize use of sprays/dusts of any kind on my vegetable plants, but use a synthetic pyrethrin dust on eggplant, so that flea beetles don’t decimate the entire crop.
I haven’t tried it myself, but this guy advocates wrapping a piece of aluminum foil around the plant stem when it’s small, leaving enough room for it to expand. The foil is tucked into the soil a little so the bug can’t bore in and lay its eggs to begin with.
That works for ‘borers’. per se. What OP is actually talking about a different bug completely (IIUC) - commonly called 'stink bug’ in Central US. A stink-bug can simply fly onto a leaf and eat/lay eggs on bottom of leaves, etc. It spemds its mights under whatever cover it can find within feel of the plant, hence the oft-used m ethod of row-covering, etc when u can easily kill off lots of the critters with easy maual methods/ Quite a different lifestyle than the dreaded borers. Been there/done that, so to speak, on more than few seasons :eek: Usually planted the squash seed under a toilet-paper tube wrapped with foil and worked pretty good -v- borers. Both are definitely a gripe to deal with, ny all means.
Squash vine borer adults are moths, that’s the reason floating row covers work. The fabric prevents the female adult from getting close to the plant, in order to lay eggs. Squash bugs are a whole different animal, literally and figuratively. I swear the squash bugs are IN the seeds I plant. I live in a big city, so not anywhere near major farms with squash and related crops. Just how good and far-reaching is there homing sense? Whenever I see those gray/black little SOB’s, and sometimes there are hundreds of them, I know it’s just about over.
You have to be diligent inspecting your plants; don’t let garden debris accumulate; try insecticidal soap, the hot pepper/garlic stuff is useless; curse them to the pits of Hell from which they come.