I was DONE Growing Zucchini Until I Learned How To Control Squash Bugs and Vine Borers

When it comes to growing zucchini, I can't think of a more productive crop, a faster growing crop, but I also can't think of a crop that has more questions around pests than zucchini. In today's episode, I'm going to talk all about zucchini pests, how to reduce them, how to help keep your zucchinis pest-free and healthy and happy longer into the season so you can grow more of these amazing vegetables. When it comes to squash and zucchinis in particular, there's a couple pests that come right to the top of mind. Now, squash and zucchinis, they don't really have too many pests because they have more of a, they have more of a leathery leaf, it's quite thick, and because there's actually some prickly burrs on the leaves, there's not a lot of pests that really want to give squash, you know, the time of day to be a meal. And so, there are three pests in particular that we're going to talk about because these are the main three. You have squash bugs, you have squash vine borer, those are not the same, and that's why we're going to talk about them, and the cucumber beetle, and then potentially the flea beetle, but I would say if I'm picking my top three, the cucumber beetle, the squash vine borer, and the squash bugs are three of the top pests that affect your zucchini plants, and we're going to talk about how to prevent them, and kind of the differences, and how they, how they interact with your plant. So, the first bug we're going to talk about is one we actually noticed on this leaf right here, and this is a squash bug. Now, squash bugs, they look a lot like a box elder bug, they also look a lot like a stink bug, they get, they just get a lot of different names here, and I'm going to give this guy a little squish and send him to the big squash bug in the sky, but squash bugs are not the same as squash vine borer. Squash bugs look very similar to box elder bugs and stink bugs, hence the stink bug king t-shirt. I've had to wear this for this episode, haven't brought it out since we did the the seed man part two episode. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you either know or you don't, but so a lot of people get them confused with stink bugs or box elder bugs because they look very similar. Now, I'm sure without knowing, I'm not a, you know, I'm not a biologist, I would imagine they're probably in the same family. They look so similar, but they are markedly different. Squash bugs are usually the first insect that you're going to see come onto your squash plants because the squash bugs, they come in, their season is around late June to about mid-July. That's when the squash bugs first start to come in. Now, when they come in, you'll notice them more than likely on the undersides of the leaves. The male and the female squash bug will actually, they mate by essentially conjoining their rear ends together and you'll see them kind of doing a dance on the leaf, conjoined, and once their mating process ends, the female then lays eggs on the underside of the leaves and you'll notice the eggs by these little orange clusters. Many people get those confused with the squash vine borer and that's not the case because squash vine borer is a different insect altogether that we're going to talk about. Now, the squash bugs, what they do is they basically feed on the tender parts of the plant and they basically are like a gigantic aphid. They suck all the juices out of the leaves and the nutrients that the plant provides and then they basically stay near the plant, reproducing, and that whole cycle happens all over again. The female typically can lay up to 30 eggs per laying cycle before the cycle happens all over again. Now, 30 eggs doesn't seem like a lot, but when you have, we have 25 squash plants here, each plant could potentially have dozens. I've already gone through and killed probably seven or eight squash bugs just from ones that I visibly saw. There's obviously ones that have already came through and laid their eggs, and so the first thing you can do is just by squishing them. They're very easy to find. You just simply lift the leaves up, give the leaves an inspection, and if you need to either physically remove the leaf, that's fine, or you can take duct tape around your finger and simply swipe at the underside of the leaf and they'll cling to the duct tape, or you can try to squish the adults if, you know, if you can find them, that's fine as well. They don't usually fly all that well when they're in the process of laying eggs, and so you can pretty easily control them that way, but those are all very physical removal controls. Physical removal is a, it's kind of a, it's a very inefficient way of controlling the pests because you're only one person, and just like I can see, you know, just like I just squished another one, so just like I can see them on the leaf here and squish them, there's so many more that I can't see, and because of that, I know that the problem is going to be more widespread than it actually is. Now they use squash plants as a host, so they're going to be isolated to your zucchini plants, your squash plants, and that's why they get the name squash bug. Now another way that you can reduce them is by using a pesticide like bt or spinosad. There are flowers that form on the squash plants. Those flowers can be pollinated by bees, so this is something that I recommend being very careful about. Now spinosad and bt are only dangerous to bees when it is wet, so what I recommend doing is spraying bt or spinosad at night, spraying them down, spraying your plants down. Typically you'd never do this, but because you don't want leaves to be wet at night because that leads to powdery mildew, but what you wanted to do is you wanted to dry before the morning comes when the flowers open and the bees become active. That way you can control the pest without actually harming the beneficial insects. Butterflies, native bees, honey bees, we don't want to harm those. We'd never want to harm those, so I recommend spraying at night because once it is dry, it is inactive and it does not have an effect on pollinators. So spraying them down, that is my preferred way of controlling the squash bug because physical removal just simply is not efficient enough for me to do that. The next control method is something you can do, but it does require some infrastructure and that's by covering your plants with a product called tulle or insect netting. Now if you cover your plants, they need to stay covered at all times. The smallest crack will let a squash bug in and then they'll simply be in your plant treating it like a like a salad bar right next to its home. So what we want to do is keep it covered. Some people make cages, some people will drape it and weigh it down with with bricks, you know, some people will choose to make an entire enclosure. That's entirely up to you, but you need to make sure that your plants are completely covered so that the insects cannot get in. And then last but not least, you can actually do what's considered a planting window. Now this is a really reliable way that we've actually done. We've done this quite a bit in the fall because squash plants will come or squash bugs will come around when your plants are stressed and they might be stressed from heat. Like today it is absolutely insane. Like I have so much sweat in my eye, I am dripping right now. It's like 93 degrees today and when your plants are stressed from heat, from drought, from nutrients, they let off a stress pheromone that the squash bugs actually hone in on and says, hey this plant is weak, let's take advantage of it. By planting a secondary crop later in the fall, a lot of times the heat has passed, a lot of the bugs have passed, and a lot of the bugs their life cycle has kind of ended. They've either gone dormant or they don't have enough time to reproduce, so they simply don't. And by planting a later fall harvest has actually helped us dramatically cut down on squash bugs as well. But if you want a summer crop of zucchini, you have to use some of those other control methods simply because you're growing your zucchini in a peak season when the squash bugs also want to survive. The next pest, pardon me, I had to get out of the sun. It was way too hot to do part of this video in the sun the whole time. But the next pest that we're going to be controlling and talking about is the squash vine borer. Now this is probably the most prominent pest that affects squash plants, despite the fact that squash bugs probably account for more damage and more affected plants than squash vine borers do. And that's because squash vine borers are actually the larva of the squash moth. Now it's a moth, not a beetle. The squash bugs that we just showed you are actually a beetle, whereas the squash vine borer are actually the larva of the squash moth. Totally two different pests, but they get very commonly mixed up. And they also use the squash plant as a host. Now not necessarily the plant itself, like the stems and the leaves. What they target is they target the base of the squash plant. The squash moth will fly around at night. I'll have Hannah throw a picture up of what the squash moth actually looks like. It's kind of like a reddish, black moth, really kind of an evil looking thing. And what it does is it lays eggs near the base of your squash plant. And then when those hatch, the little tiny larvae actually hatch and burrow a hole into the stem of the squash right near the soil level. And it will actually live inside of that cavity, consuming the vascular system of the squash plant. And so many gardeners, when they see their squash plant starting to wilt during the day and then perk up at night, the wilting and perking up during the day is because it's basically losing vascular tissue that allows the transfer of water and nutrients up and down the plant. And so as it's consuming the base of the plant, you'll notice your plant starts to wilt during the day, perk up at night. First symptom. Second symptom is you'll actually find some little orange frass. The frass is actually the poop of the larva that's burrowed its way into the stem of the squash plant. You can usually see that. And then the third common symptom or kind of sign that you have a squash vine borer has to do with the fact that the plant turns very stunted and quite anemic. You'll notice that the flowers won't really be pollinated properly. The leaves might be turning kind of yellow and mottled. And that's because the nutrients, the flow of nutrients can't get up to the plant as well either. So even if the plant doesn't fully die right away, it's going to be very stunted and struggling. And if you were to make an incision cut right into the base of that squash plant, what you'll find is that you'll actually find a big white grub, a big white grub that grows inside of the squash plant. And then when it's ready to hatch, it burrows its way out after it pupates, flies away so the life cycle can happen all over again. So how do we control that? Very similarly, we would actually use a, well physical removal is not as possible, so we can't necessarily just pick them off. What we want to do is we want to use a spray like Spinosad or BT. Spinosad and BT are two reliable ways to actually control the squash vine borer. And the last way that we can actually control the squash vine borer is by planting out of its reproduction window. So the reproduction window is a little bit more narrow than the squash bug. The squash bug, you know, you're still, even if you plant a fall harvest, you're still going to have some squash bugs come in around October, November time, because depending on how long your season is, they can reproduce pretty readily. The squash vine borer, the nice thing is the fact that the reproduction window on the squash vine borer is really only from about probably late, maybe mid to late July, all the way until about late August. After that window, it's only about a month and a half to two months, you really won't have too many problems with squash vine borer after that. And so by, and again, depending on your growing season, I'm speaking from experience from us here in Michigan, you're really going to find that the window is pretty short. And if you plant too, if you plant early for a summer harvest, you're going to face them. But once the summer crop is done by planting, simply planting a fall harvest, you really won't have to do much to prevent against the squash vine borer because they just really won't exist during that time. You might have outliers, but across the board, you typically won't have them for a fall harvest. And that's why we always will plant a follow-up harvest of fall zucchini. We'll typically put seeds directly in the ground around early September or so, maybe like late August, early September when that window has finished so that we can actually have a fall harvest of zucchini. The last pest is one that is really common, but I've saved it for last because I wanted you to get the information from the most common two first, the ones that really cause people a lot of problems. The final pest we're going to talk about is actually the cucumber beetle. Now the cucumber beetle feeds on any plant in the Cucurbita family, and that's because they are attracted to the chemical Cucurbitaecin. Now, a lot of times they will feed on young or immature squash plants simply because the leaves are tender enough. Once the leaves become more mature and they've kind of hardened up and they've become rigid, they're not usually as much food for the cucumber beetle. Now the cucumber beetle, it's, uh, I'll also have to throw a picture of that up because we don't really have any around. Actually, we do. Um, we do. I see some right here on the flowers. They love the flowers because the flowers are rich in that Cucurbitaecin and they're also very tender. And they are right here. I'm a lot of times you'll find them on the flowers. These are cucumber beetles and these absolutely love the squash flowers, squash blossoms. As you can see, there's quite a few in there. We are going to also control these with the same controls as we do the other, the other pests as well, which is really nice. So just like we talked about with the other pests, what we want to do is want to control them with either physical removal, which is fairly inefficient and something that I don't prefer to do, or just spraying them down with spinosad or BT. Now, BT does not affect cucumber beetles nearly as much as spinosad does. And that's why I personally prefer spinosad. Now here's the thing that makes them really tricky is that they often will hide inside of the blossom. And in order to control them properly, you need to actually spray them with the spinosad. And because they're inside of the blossom, they sometimes find themselves kind of protected. So they can be a rather tricky pest. But one way that you can actually protect against the cucumber beetle is by actually planting what's known as a trap crop. We talk about this quite frequently. We talked about this in our broccoli pest-free guide about how we keep our broccoli free from pests. We plant a trap crop, which was in our case, a mustard plant. Now we just let the plant go. We don't do anything to it. We let those insects go over to the trap crop and basically leave our other plants alone. And you can certainly do that as well by planting a plant that they much more would rather take, you know, take as food. And that is a cucumber plant. Cucumber plants are so much higher in cucurbitaeus than the squash plants are and your zucchini plants. And so by planting a trap crop of some cucumbers 30 to 40 feet away and knowing that you're not going to consume them for their cucumbers. If you get a few cucumbers, great. But the whole objective is to grow them, just have them be essentially a food source for those pests. And you'll typically find that they will leave your squash plants alone if they have a more appealing food source. Because we don't have our cucumbers really up and growing much yet, we got a late start to the garden this year, very late in fact. But because we don't have our cucumbers up and growing yet, that food source isn't really readily available and they would typically migrate over to those. And so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be spraying at night with some some spinosad, hoping to kind of keep them under control, control them. And ultimately through that we're hoping to kind of keep our pests down about maybe by 70 to 80 percent. Still won't be 100 percent, but as an organic gardener that's just 100 percent. It's not totally practical. Now the final thing I was going to mention, and this applies to all across the board, you can actually use a chemical mask or a pheromone mask. So what we can do is we can actually mask the chemical scent, the pheromone being given off by these squash plants by using one part peppermint oil to one part lemongrass oil. What we do is we basically take a like five drops of peppermint oil, five drops of lemongrass oil, and we'll put that into a gallon sprayer. We'll shake it up with a couple drops of dish soap and we'll spray our plants down. Or we'll take cotton balls and we'll saturate that with, you know, 5-10 drops of the peppermint oil, 5-10 drops of the lemongrass oil, and we'll place those cotton balls underneath the leaves. And what that does is it actually masks the scent of your squash plants. The squash bugs, the squash vine borers, they're seeking out that specific host signal given off by the squash plants when they are under duress. When they're stressed and they're weakened, that's when they come in and they hone in. And so the scent drifts throughout the area, which actually brings them in as kind of that host plant. So if you mask the scent of that, they can't find it as easily. Lastly, you can try this with limited success. You can plant around your zucchini plants with very fragrant herbs like basil, sage, thyme, oregano, dill, and it can work. It's not foolproof, but obviously with limited success, you can try that as well. And I hope you guys enjoyed. I hope you all learned something new. I really hope that this helps to control the pest problem. And I also apologize if it seems like I am like getting fried and baked. It's because I am. But I do these videos for you and I really hope that it helps. So I'm going to get out of the sun so I don't turn into a piece of bacon. And I'll catch you guys later on the next episode. As always, this is Luke from the In My Gardener channel, reminding you to grow bigger and don't spray anything in the heat of the day. Otherwise you'll kill your plants. Wait till the evening and we'll catch you guys later. All right. Grow bigger. Bye. Hey, thank you so much for watching today's video. I really appreciate it. If you enjoyed, consider clicking this one. You'll probably enjoy it just as much. I want to thank you for your viewership because without it, this channel would not be as amazing as it is. Also, if you haven't subscribed, consider subscribing. It's free and we upload videos every Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. We also have vegetable seeds, fertilizer, or tools. If you need any of those, consider visiting InMyGardener.com. Links will be in the description box below. We've got you covered. And as always, we'll see you all in the garden. Take care. Bye.