DeeDoo’s Digital Scrapbooking Blog

My last post featured this photo of the squash I was so proud of:

Two days after I published that photo, the plant looked wilted. I had been watering every other day because of our high temperatures, so I thought it must be needing more water. So I gave it more water. Didn’t help.

So I jumped to trusty Google and almost immediately found what did end up being the answer to the wilt – squash vine borers. The description was gross, but when we examined the base of the vine, this is what we found:

Turns out the ‘squash vine beetle’ lays its eggs right smack on the vine and when the little boogers hatch they bore into the vine and eat, eat, eat. Apparently they are ravenous eaters, because the damage was severe in just a couple of days. Everything we read told us that once the wilt is obvious, the plant likely can’t be saved. You can see how bad ours was by the time we discovered it. Yes, we pulled the whole, now very ugly and wilted, plant up and bagged and trashed it. Although it killed us to see what happened to the beautiful plant, we couldn’t afford to allow the larvae to drop off and into the soil. The info we got said they drop after feeding, bury themselves for a year in your garden, then come up and become moths/beetles and go about laying eggs. Arrrggghhhhh!

That spot in the garden didn’t stay empty long. We transferred a younger squash plant to that spot and we are watching to see if it will survive the transplant AND if it will succumb to the same fate as its older brother. We are told that if we wait until after mid-July we can safely plant new squash without fear of vine borers. They won’t be laying eggs after then until next year. So we’ll see.