Don't Squash my Summer Dreams

December 13, 2015 6:57 PM

Squash bugs ate two years of cucurbits, will one year off cure us of them?

We bought a house in Fall 2013 that had a garden that was overgrown with melon and pumpkins. Some squash bugs had taken up residence and the in Summer 2014 ate up all our pumpkins and cucumbers. This last summer we did not grow any types of squash and did not see any squash bugs as a result.

Will taking a year off of squash be sufficient to keep our garden rid of the squash bug menace?

I've googled this extensively, but have not found out how long we need to keep these crops out of rotation.

If it matters we live in the country and I don't know that our neighbors garden so likely we are at least 1/2 a mile away from any other potential squash harboring areas.

posted by aetg to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

In my experience, no.

But in my experience, after I had my heart torn from my body by those hideous fuckers the second time, I just swore to never plant cucurbits again.

According to my father, who grew up farming and still gardens and thinks the idea of organic gardening is cute but impossible, nothing short of high-test pyrethrins (permethrins? I get them confused) - Sevin dust - will work.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:03 PM on December 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Same experience as Lyn Never. Every couple of years I try again, but nope.

The first thing I'm going to do when we buy a new house is plant some damn cucumbers.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:12 PM on December 13, 2015

Response by poster: We do have free range chickens now so at least some of them ought to get eaten, at least that is the my hope
posted by aetg at 8:06 PM on December 13, 2015

I don't know if this is helpful, but: I built a brand-new raised-bed garden in the brand-new backyard of my brand-new house a few years ago, and squash bugs promptly showed up and destroyed my squash on the first planting. My neighbors don't have vegetable gardens. I don't know how the bugs knew that my backyard was the place to be that summer. We have wild gourd plants in the area, but I've never seen bugs on them.

I haven't tried planting in that bed again. I was also going organic and never found a way to control them, and I'm worried they'll show up again. So I'll watch the answers to this thread with interest.
posted by liet at 9:03 PM on December 13, 2015

Unfortunately "squash bugs" are native to some places, so waiting will not work.

Organic methods that can help:
- Netting over the clean beds, or floating row covers. Definitely put the chickens to work before covering.
- Going through regularly with a bucket of soapy water and a brush. Knock the adults into the water and scrub off the eggs with the wet brush. (A squash trellis might make this easier.)

The worst damage occurs prior to fruiting, so you can be less assiduous after that.
posted by zennie at 7:12 AM on December 14, 2015

Maybe try a Three Sisters garden? Corn, beans, squash. Squash were successfully planted for centuries in North America without heavy duty insecticide. That said, the varieties were, well, much more varied. Ditto for the corn, lots more variety (and much better tasting, speaking as someone who grew up eating native-to-America multi-colored corn varieties).
posted by fraula at 11:12 AM on December 14, 2015

Hi there, I grew up on a farm (and we grew lots of squash) where Anasa tristis is native and commonplace. If you're in the U.S., odds are you live where they're native and commonplace, too.

A few notes:
-A rest period won't help (they fly and actively seek out food sources over great distances).
-What will help is raking out as much of your yard's leaf litter--even if only in the immediate area where your curcubits grow--before spring. Those bugs that survived this season are now hanging out under leaf litter, rocks, boards, shingles, anything else in the area that's on the ground near where they fed during warmer months (my parents would occasionally even lay down dry straw over the litter and have a low-fuel/low-heat proscribed burn, mostly to dump a bunch of potassium into the soil but also to take out overwintering insects, with the downside being that this takes out a lot of beneficial insects, too, but in a less atomic context than insecticidal application).
-Next year, start your new cucurbits indoors or under mesh covering if outdoors. The stronger start you can give your plants, the greater the odds they'll survive.
-Look into getting some seed from regionally native cultivars of the cucurbits you want to grow. Introduce some different genetic predisposition to pest resistance to your growing stock (your previous tenants probably had a single, overly susceptible varietal growing). Let the mature plants that make it to bloom hybridize. Save seed from and specimens that make it to seed for the following year. Repeat.
-Insecticides are infamously ineffective against Anasa, and the high concentrations that are effective will kill every pollinator imaginable. Avoid.
-Prolonged wet growing seasons are hard on many cucurbits. This year there was widespread commercial squash crop failure in the part of the country where I come from because of early summer rainfall that led to root rot and mold issues. If you had a wet year, this may have helped weaken your plants and promote Anasa population booms. A raised bed might help with local water/drainage issues, but that's no guarantee (my folks keep an above-ground bale garden for kitchen crops, as a way to deal with the swampy tendency of the region, but they still lost their squash this year).

Good luck!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 3:25 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Good garden hygiene, hand picking, and neem, horticultural or canola oil sprays are good. There's no evidence that more toxic pesticides work better than handpicking and oils on squash bugs- they are very resistant to pesticides (unlike bees and other beneficials).
posted by oneirodynia at 4:56 PM on December 14, 2015