Pride Has Its Downfall: The Demise of the Buttercup Squash

For the second year in a row, my squash vines have died. The first year, it was the squash bugs that killed them—those hard-shelled creatures that smelled sourly of spoiled cantaloupe when they were smashed. When I examined the corpses, squash bug eggs were everywhere on the undersides of the brittle, gray-brown leaves.

With squash bugs, once you know what you’re looking for, it’s very easy to find them in every stage of their lives. The adults are big, usually at least three-quarters of an inch long, with dull brown coloration. Their backs are shaped like flattened footballs, and their snouts come to a small point, the better to pierce the stems of unsuspecting squash plants and their near relatives, the cucumbers and melons. They try to keep a low profile, and will move to the opposite side of a stem or leaf if they see you looking for them. Often, they may be found at the base of the plant. Sometimes, an adult squash bug or two will emerge after a heavy watering, perhaps because they don’t like being soaked.

The nymphs can be as small as a pinhead, with milky, gray-green bodies and long, thin, spidery legs. Like the adults, they move quickly to the other side of a leaf if they know they’ve been spotted. They tend to cluster on the undersides of leaves, and they’re very easy to squish when young—the mere touch of a finger will do the trick. The eggs are laid in orderly clusters on the undersides of leaves—usually squash leaves, as the nymphs survive best on a squash plant, but sometimes they appear on the leaves of other cucurbit family plants. One squash bug in my garden must have been disoriented, because I recently found a clutch of squash bug eggs on a bean leaf. When ripe, the eggs are an easy-to-spot leathery red-brown; when freshly laid, they are gray. I used to remove an entire leaf if I found squash bug eggs on it, but I later found it just as easy to pinch off the eggs and flush them down an indoor drain.

This year, the squash bugs were fewer in number, and I managed to hunt down all their eggs and nymphs before they could cause much damage to the plants. But there was another enemy I hadn’t reckoned on: the dreaded squash vine borer. The moth that metamorphoses from this horrible larva is said to be an interesting-looking creature, very much like an orange-and-black wasp in appearance, although I have never seen its adult form except in photographs. One moth may lay many eggs, and because the eggs are laid singly, all over the plant, they are much harder to find than squash bug eggs, although they are only slightly smaller and have the same red-brown color.

I crushed many of these eggs between my fingers before I found out what they were; I merely assumed they were bad because they looked like bug eggs and they were on my plants. They appeared on the undersides of leaves, along the vines, on flowers, in the curves of tendrils—anywhere a tiny object could possibly be stuck. When I saw a wet, yellow powder dripping from the underside of a vine, I thought I might be in for some trouble, but I ignored the problem, not wanting to know the truth. In fact, that yellow powder was the frass that emerged from the larva, which is an entomologist’s fancy way of saying that it was caterpillar poop.

One thing I already knew from my reading was that the cure for squash vine borers sounds worse than the disease: you have to slit the vine open lengthwise with a sharp knife and pull the creature out. While I dallied, the larvae ate away at the plants’ vascular systems, destroying their ability to transport water and nutrients to their leaves. Soon, their presence was evident everywhere, as entire vines suddenly wilted, turning a wall of gorgeous, green leaves into a graveyard in a single afternoon. I went at the vines with the knife and pulled out the pulpy, soft-bodied, maggot-like culprits one by one, but it was too late. In the end, I found at least 40 of the creatures inside the vines, some of them almost an inch long and as fat as the vine itself. The vines, already weakened by the pests, could not recover from my hacking, so in the end, I had to take out two more plants by the root (in addition to the one that an early arrival among the larvae had killed more than a month ago) and throw them in the trash.

My biggest squash vine had time to put out one fair-sized fruit and two smaller ones. They are lying on my countertop now. If I’m lucky, the larger squash may prove edible when I cut it open. There is one survivor among the squash vines. It, too, hosted its share of vine borers, but so far, it has not suffered much from being cut open at the base. I haven’t much hope for getting anything out of that vine, however: all the fruits it has produced have been afflicted with blossom-end rot. The Man with the Perfect Lawn informs me that the garden center sells a product that I can spray on the leaves that will cure the problem by providing an instant calcium supplement, but I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble. After lying on my back and cutting out those horrible creatures one by one from the vines, I’m weary of the whole enterprise. Next year, if I decide to try again with this plant, I might have to use an insecticide. For me, that’s a serious acknowledgment of defeat.

The only bright spot in this affair may be that the squash has attracted these pests away from the cucumbers and melons, which have been quite happy (except for rabbit damage, in the case of the cantaloupe). Perhaps I should change the way I view the buttercup squash and use them as decoys instead of crop-bearing plants, much as I used the radishes that I sowed among the lettuce rows. The trouble is, I have a great liking for this type of winter squash, which gives me the greater motivation to try to keep it alive and producing. One day, I must learn how to evade the legions of pests that assail these lush vines, for when the weather turns cold, there are few foods as comforting as a lovely squash. When boiled, its deep-orange flesh turns soft and smooth; when battered and deep-fried, the slivers of squash melt delightfully as you chew them, reminding you with each sunny, sweet bite of the warmth of the summer that was.

The Not-So-Cute Runt

Just as the garden has its monster plants that grab everyone else’s space, it also has those small fry that fail to thrive—for a while, at least. Sometimes it’s easy to figure them out and find a cure for what ails them, but more often they produce nothing but frustration.

I first learned about the concept of runts from children’s books like Charlotte’s Web and The Hundred and One Dalmatians. The runt, in the shape of a tiny piglet or a warm, furless puppy, sounds cute and cuddly, ready to be rescued by any reasonably sensitive, loving child. It’s (literally) the underdog, the one you root for because it has so much spirit for its diminutive size. Stories about runts are inevitably ones of overcoming adversity, of internal goodness coming through, and of unexpected triumph.

But plants that are runts are far from cute. They’re just undergrown, maybe diseased or yellowing, or possibly just weak and spindly. It’s hard to love a plant that won’t put forth new leaves and stems, especially if you’ve planted only a few of its kind. Until this past week, one of my two Green Zebra tomato plants was giving me serious worries in that vein. Of the eight tomato plants I put into the garden, that one remained the smallest, and for a while, it seemed that it had hardly grown at all after I transplanted it. There was no explanation for why it was smaller than the others; its partner plant was keeping up with all the other varieties.

I treated that plant exactly the same as the others, if not better. I showered it with just a little more water (not too much, but enough to demonstrate a certain concern). I gave it the same amount of liquid fertilizer as the others, when I used the artificial stuff about four weeks ago. Nothing persuaded it to grow faster, though it showed no indications of ill health. Then, a few days ago, it began to pick up a little. It’s still on the small side, but it’s looking more and more like a real tomato plant, something that might produce a few juicy ones by summer’s end. My runt tomato still isn’t lovable, but at least it is no longer an object of worried speculation.

Others have not fared so well. My runt squash plant, as I have explained, fell victim to a vine borer and thus perished. The eggplant that survived a vicious rabbit attack which left it with a single emerging leaflet is still in its cage, waiting for the day its leaves become big enough to withstand a few bunny bites without disappearing entirely into the bunny’s bowels. Actually, all my eggplants can be considered runts, because none is exactly thriving. I’d like to think it’s just because they haven’t yet reached that critical point in the summer when the lengthening roots start stimulating new growth and flowering, but I don’t know whether that will ever happen.

One of the three Anaheim pepper plants that I planted in a group beneath a crape myrtle tree simply refuses to grow. It, too, is caged, because three bites from any creature would effectively end its existence . . . not that it would matter much at this point, because I doubt the thing will ever produce a pepper. It is half the size of its sisters, grown in nearly the same conditions. I’ve been wondering, though, if a wandering tree root might be making trouble for the little plant, stealing away its nutrients. If that’s the case, it’s too late to correct the problem. I might throw some fertilizer granules around it, or I might simply give up and let it live out its days as a reminder of Why You Shouldn’t Plant Around Trees.

Essentially, runts in the garden are mistakes, flops, failures. They’re not there just because nature made them so; it’s the gardener herself who is ultimately responsible for noticing the squash vine borer, the inadequate nutrition, the infernal bunnies, or the thieving tree root. It still bothers me that I could never figure out what was going on with that tomato. The squash vine bothers me even more, of course, being dead. It’s a lost opportunity. The pepper plant deflates my self-image each time I hose it down. At times like these, it’s best to look away from the runts and just stop wondering about them. Success is a far better motivator, even if it offers less food for thought.

Motivations

On the radio tonight, I heard an NPR story about the singer Adrienne Young, who is determined to spread the gospel about local and organic foods and about community gardening. That’s all well and good, but she doesn’t exactly look like a farm girl (in her photograph, at least)—her hands are too well manicured, her fingernails too long, perfect, and immaculate to ever spend much time actually touching the soil. I’m not saying she’s a hypocrite—far from it. She obviously cares about gardens and the condition of the earth, and by bringing them to the attention of her admirers and supporting the cause of seed saving, she is opening the way for many more people to come into contact with the idea of growing something on their own.

I find it strange, though, that gardens have become trendy, the latest thing to be hyped by singers. Dirt is so—well, dirty. And gardens are so full of weeds and bugs. But the weird thing about gardening, for me, is that although I have some fellow-feeling for these motives of growing food locally and not poisoning the earth, that’s not quite why I do it. Nor does it necessarily give me a peaceful feeling to be out there, looking at my plants. I’m always thinking about the next step, the next shovelful of dirt, the next foe. I do have pride in the results of my work, now that the squash and cucumbers have leaves approaching dinner-plate size, but last summer I went on caring for my plants even after they languished in the inhospitable mulch and unremitting heat.

The food, too, sometimes seems beside the point, even though some of my plants have grown to a size at which food can be harvested from them. The point is to grow and cultivate and selectively determine what plants thrive on a given space. In part, it’s a control game, and because my plants are thriving, I’m winning, for now, at least. That sounds somewhat twisted, I know, but it’s true. I like to dictate to the dirt, to tell it to push up a bean here or nurture a tomato there.

Would I recommend that everyone else grow a garden? As the Man with the Perfect Lawn says, if it were easy, everyone would do it. Gardening takes time, persistence, attention, and strength. Certainly, for those who are interested, it’s a marvelous ride. You get a new perspective on the summer itself, and you are drawn into closer proximity to the surrounding world, though not always in the most comfortable way. Spinach and peas like the cold; squash and melons love the heat. Humidity brings life-giving rain and death-dealing fungal diseases. The birds eat harmful insects, but they also snap up seeds and fruit.

So, yes, take that packet of seeds that comes with your Adrienne Young album and see if you can do something with them. Find a place to grow them. If it makes you frustrated to cater to their needs and discover their idiosyncrasies, then perhaps you’re not the gardening type. If you’re fascinated by failures as well as successes, you might get hooked on this venture, which (for good reason) was formerly the province of confirmed putterers and curmudgeons, people who mix a willingness to wait (which some might mistake for laziness) with incorrigible stubbornness.

Gardens defy the natural order, even while they affirm our position within it. Success, when it comes, is marvelous (and necessary), but the attempt itself, the ability to wring a certain strain of fertile beauty from chaos, has its own grandeur. The squash flower opens with a pomp greater than the sounding of trumpets in the imperial procession, and its issue is far more important to our continued existence.

Desperate Measures

Well, I was wrong, and I might as well admit it at the start. Rabbits will take a nibble of just about anything, it seems, and they will certainly eat most of a tender young eggplant or pepper plant, given the opportunity. They don’t care for melons, cucumbers, and squash, but one muskmelon plant had a single broad leaf half bitten away the night after I transplanted it into the flowerbed.

At first, as I have chronicled, the peas and beans were decimated by these creatures. That’s when I put up the fence. It worked—for one or two nights. I don’t know how they found their way back in, for I did my best to see that there were no gaps at the bottom, but they did, and the new beans lost their heads on a nightly basis. Outside the main garden, I had planted the eggplants and peppers, and two mornings later found one of the larger eggplants reduced to a single sprouting leaf, while several of the peppers were leafless on one side.

I contained the problem by placing plastic plant pots over the larger plants and plastic Dixie cups (of which, luckily, I possessed a nearly endless supply) over the smaller ones each night. Putting those cups on the plants each night was hard work, but it did the job. Rabbits are good at getting past barriers, but it seems that they’re just not smart enough to figure out what’s underneath an upside-down cup.

Soon, however, the carnage moved back into an unexpected quarter of the main garden. Peter Rabbit fancied a forbidden bite of lettuce. The invaders in my garden ignored the puny lettuce and spinach seedlings, but the Swiss chard, a tough, leafy member of the beet family, was disappearing, one handsome, three-inch seedling at a time. I spent a few nights covering each plant in that long row of chard with its own cup. But I was about to go on vacation for a week, and although I had arranged for a neighbor to water the plants, I knew no one who would willingly cover dozens of plants with cups each night and remove the cups in the morning. I felt rather foolish about the entire venture myself.

Stronger measures were necessary, I decided. Back to the hardware store I drove, grumbling all the way. I brought home a roll of chicken wire three feet wide and fifty feet long, the only size the store still had in supply. Although I should have been preparing for the next morning’s eleven-hour drive to my conference in Tennessee, I instead stayed up past midnight hacking at the chicken wire, holding each section of roll open with a chair on one side and a piano bench on the other while I clipped the wires. When I finished cutting through a section of wire, it would snap back into a curved position, scraping my arms and legs.

From the smaller wire sections, I fashioned cylindrical cages for the peppers and eggplants. For the row of Swiss chard and onions, I cut a nine and a half–foot length of wire. This larger section rolled and buckled until I manhandled (or womanhandled) it into submission. I straightened four wire clothes hangers and threaded them through the wire at regular intervals, then, with much difficulty and swearing, I curved the entire piece longwise into a row cover.

Early the next morning, I covered my seedlings and maneuvered the row cover into place (muttering many hard oaths the entire while). The row cover didn’t fit the ground exactly, so on its exposed side (away from the fence) I shoveled a few inches of dirt from between the garden rows.

None of this made my subsequent driving trip any easier, but at least I had peace of mind. I had awakened that morning dreaming that I was handing an eggplant to a fellow named Itai (an Israeli name, I think, but the word coincidentally means “ouch” in Japanese) whom I had met at journalism school and who had lived down the hall from me. The dream was disturbing, because I had no reason to believe my worthy former colleague would care for the plant. My rather quixotic last stand against rabbits at least convinced me that I had done all I could for the garden. Though success was not guaranteed, the garden would have to hold its own against Nature’s fury for the next five days.

Seedlings

The vegetable and flower seeds started appearing in February, arrayed on tall racks at Lowe’s and Target. Each packet showed off a picture of the ideal specimen of its variety, a picture that practically screamed, “Plant me now!”

It’s hard for a gardener to resist that siren song. Last year, I heard it clearly and felt I was getting a late start when I planted my seeds indoors in March. It was a choice I ended up regretting. Everything looked perfect at first. The tomato seedlings sprang up vigorously, the thyme ran riot, and the basil—ah, the basil!—grew into a verdant mass of scented leaves. But outside the house, the cold winds howled all through April.

By the time I was ready to transplant my tomato seedlings into the garden, they were tall, skinny, spindly things. I planted them deeply, knowing that tomato stems planted underground will produce roots, but the plants still poked too far above the soil. The next harsh wind weakened the plants. I kept the peppers, eggplant, and cucurbits (cucumbers, melons, and squash) inside for several more weeks, until the weather turned milder, and they tangled themselves into a jungle on the dining room table.

This year, I was determined to do things differently. I started buying the seeds early, but I stored them away. My next-door neighbor, The Man with the Perfect Lawn, started his seeds in late March. I decided to start mine in mid-April. When the time came, however, I was immersed in other activities, too busy to dibble in seed starter. I planted my seeds just last week—too late, perhaps, to get much of a head start on the growing season, but certainly not too early.

The tomatoes started coming up a few days ago, starting with the Early Girl tomato seeds I bought last year. Yesterday, the first eggplant seed sprouted. The Anaheim and Aurora peppers haven’t yet reared up any vestige of stem or leaf.

Each time a seed sends out its first stem into the sunlight, I wonder at how such a large mass of life can emerge so quickly from something so small. Some of the tomato seeds I planted—the seeds of tiny currant tomatoes—were no larger than a grain of sand, yet their seedlings are already one inch high. Still, after the first leaves have emerged, the seed’s most important job is done. It has given the plant embryo enough nutrition to meet the sunlight and send out roots to photosynthesize and absorb moisture on its own.

Underestimate the seedling’s powers of growth, and you might end up, as I did last spring, with a table full of young plants straining to break free from their peat pots.