From Bad to Worse

Well, apparently the death and destruction being wrought by pests in our garden wasn't done yet. Remember this picture from last week?

Well, here's the picture from today.



Totally bare in the middle of the plot, except for a few vines from our winter squash plant. We've officially lost all four summer squash/zucchini plants. Saddest day ever. 

And, as helpful as the Internet can be, we still aren't entirely sure of the problem. This is what the stems looked like prior to pulling them.

Here's a close up shot of the stem after we broke it off (which, believe me, wasn't a difficult task at all as broken down as these stems were).

So, I did some research, and the best explanation I could find for this was that it was frass, which is a common indicator of an infestation of squash vine borers. And sure enough, as I looked at the pictures, I remember thinking that I saw black and red bugs like that in the garden but just didn't know what they were. Squash vine borers lay their eggs at the base of the plant and the larvae burrow into the stem and grow there, which is basically what kills the plant (and what causes the frass). So, I grabbed my gloves and a box cutter and decided to dig a little deeper into the plant, hoping to find a larvae to confirm the presence of squash vine borers. And all I found was this.

Little black beetle-looking things. Which we also found in one of the other plants. But we never found any larvae, and bugs like this are not consistent with squash vine borers. So, back to the Internet I went. The only other common squash pest are squash bugs--which, coincidentally--look strikingly like stink bugs. And we definitely had one or the other in our garden this spring, because I happened to see one while Darrell was out there with me and he identified it as a stink bug. However, squash bugs lay their eggs on the leaves (which we never saw, but then again, we weren't looking there), and the have longer legs and antennas than the bugs we found in the stem (plus they never really have a black coloring). So who knows. We'll definitely try a few things differently next year, so here's to hoping that something actually works and we can enjoy a full summers worth of squash and zucchini. Fingers crossed!