Squash Vine Borers
Every garden has an archnemesis, and the squash vine
borer is ours. Unless you've experienced it, it's hard to
imagine the sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you go out
and your three foot tall squash plant --- complete with young fruits
--- keels over in an afternoon.
Our first vine borer year, I caught the infestation too late, and had
to try the poke-the-caterpillars-with-a-pin method. I'm here to
tell you that doesn't work.
So now we spray Bt once a week. I'm not entirely comfortable with
it, even though Bt is a bacterium, not a chemical. If anyone has
had good luck killing off their squash vine borers another way, I'd be
curious to hear it.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I have an organic method for controlling squash borer that worked this year on my Zucchini, but it won't help for butternut squash.
In New Hampshire we only have one generation of SVB a year. So I waited until July (after egg laying time) to plant Zucchini. I also covered the vines to make it hard for any SVB stragglers to find a place to lay eggs. Waiting won't work for winter squash because it takes too long for the gourds to ripen. You can't plant that late and still get ripe fruit.
I didn't have any SVBs and did get some Zucchini. Still I had other difficulties that prevented a full harvest. New Hampshire can be a difficult place to grow squash.
houligan19 --- Some of our friends grew those two years ago. They were pretty, but I didn't think as tasty as our favorite varieties.
Yellow crookneck also has a reputation for being borer resistant and we grew that last year. We really liked the taste, but the borers still got them. (Maybe it took longer for the vines to succumb, though? I'm not sure....)