These creatures are called Squash Bugs and they killed one of my zucchini plants. Ugh!I did kill a few squash bugs here and there but, not knowing what they were, didn't realize they were so dangerous to a garden. How wrong I was. I won't let this happen again. I guess I can chalk this up to the learning curve of a new gardener.
I spotted the big bugs about one month ago and put down some bug killer, but apparently they are extremely hard to kill. I didn't realize they lay eggs and hatch babies really quickly. Yuck. They lay their eggs on the underside of the leaves so in order to find the eggs you have to really hunt. You can either remove the leaf or squish the eggs. The bugs are hard to find too. They hide way under the plant or hover on the underside of the giant leaves. The way they kill the plant is by feeding on the leaves, and eventually the fruit, via piercing/sucking mouthparts. Isn't that description lovely.
As I was trying to figure out what went wrong I was looking at my good zucchini plant. I lifted up one leaf and it looked just like the bottom right picture above. Baby squash bugs everywhere. I cut that leaf off and squished them all really good. Oh, it feels good to kill things that you're mad at (hee hee).
Squash Bugs especially like yellow squash and devoured that as well. Then they moved on to the zucchini. They also like cucumbers and pumpkins.
Too bad I had to research all this after the fact.
I do have one zucchini plant left and have cut all the leaves off that had eggs on them. We don't see any more signs of Squash bugs...yet. Little Mister and I are on high alert. We are crossing our fingers that our last zucchini plant makes it.
Hopefully no one else has this terrible problem.
We must count our blessings in all this and are grateful for all the zucchini we harvested before the death of a beautiful plant.
1 comment:
your garden posts are motivating my to start a garden. Don't know if I can do it though. I can't even keep plants alive. We'll see
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