Mid-summer is the fat part of the year here on the East End – time to chill on the beach, savor tomatoes plucked from the vine, fire up the grill and enjoy long a leisurely dinner watching the fireflies light up the night.
But mid-summer also brings its challenges especially in the garden, where all too often we must face an infestation of bugs. Chief among the most destructive pests are squash borers and bugs which usually start making their appearance in mid-July, not long after the first batch of zucchinis have been harvested. If you’re not careful, these bugs and borers can take over pretty darn fast, turning a healthy plant into a dead one in just a few short days.
So as soon as you notice yellow discoloration on the leaves or rot on the stems of your squash plants, it’s time to spring into action. Here’s what we’ve been doing this year in the Food Pantry Garden to hold the squash borers and bugs at bay – a campaign in two parts, since there are different pests, designed to restore your squash plants to health.
Part 1: Fight fire with fire, as Shakespeare put it, an approach we use in the garden by deploying good bugs to fight the bad ones. When it comes to combating squash bugs there is no weapon more potent than nematodes, or roundworms, which are tiny transparent critters that love to feed on the squash bug larvae.
We bought our nematodes from buglogical.com but you can find lots of other sources online. They will arrive in a neat little package with very clear instructions for application but the long and short of it is that you drop the nematodes into a full watering can and then apply to the entire squash bed.
You may want to apply the nematodes a second time depending on the severity of the infestation.
Part 2: The other menace to your squash plants is the squash borer, which as the name implies, loves to drill little holes into squash and feast on its insides. The key ingredient in fighting the squash borer is a soil dwelling bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (usually abbreviated as Bt) which you can buy online or at any garden center in the form of a spray. Bt is the most common biological pesticide used worldwide.
Here are the steps we follow in applying the Bt:
1. Remove leaves that have any eggs & hatched nymphs on them and any adults running around in the beds and put them in a bucket of soapy water. The soap kills them. A simple method of extermination but alone is not sufficient to control most infestations.
2. Slice open infested stems to expose larvae and spray Bt into the cut.
3. Apply more Bt around soil and stems.
4. Mound up soil over and under the stems so that the plant can create new roots & stems to bypass infested areas.
Maybe it’s already too late to save your squash crop this year. If so, perhaps you should bookmark this page and be ready for next year because, sure enough, the bugs and borers will return, in which case you want to make sure you have some nematodes and Bt close at hand …. Here are some photos of the Food Pantry Garden campaign to save our squash plants over the last few weeks.
