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.

Monsters of the Garden

Certain plants meander along fitfully until midsummer . . . and then take over the entire garden once they hit their stride. I am speaking, naturally, of squash, melons, and cucumbers, but especially of the squash.

When I planted buttercup squash again this year, I had little hope for the long-term survival of the big, flat seeds that I pressed into the open earth. Last year’s plants, which I had started indoors in peat pots, were vigorous, thick-leaved, and about a foot and a half long when I planted them out in the garden, but they soon shriveled and yellowed in the inhospitable mulch. I kept them alive for a few weeks with successive applications of artificial fertilizers, but then the squash bugs laid eggs on them, and the young nymphs sucked all the juices out. It was the first time I’d ever dealt with those insects. In Colorado, where I grew up, I had never seen any such problem, though my family grew far too much zucchini every year.

This year, I never got around to planting zucchini. I didn’t want to plant two kinds of squash close together, because (according to the venerable Edward C. Smith) large groupings of the same kinds of plants make a sort of one-stop shop for marauding insects. I meant to prepare another flowerbed for zucchini, but I’ll admit, the motivation wasn’t very strong (not that there’s anything wrong with zucchini).

Perhaps sensing an opportunity to impress in the absence of its super-productive cousin, the buttercup squash has outgrown every other plant in the garden. Its vines have climbed sideways on my supposedly rabbit-proof garden fence, and as of this morning, the longest vine spans the length of the fence on one side. That means it’s at least ten feet long—and since it’s climbed up diagonally, it might even be longer. The two squash plants on the far side of the fence have been excellent producers, as well. There are at least four developing squash fruits, and the largest one has grown to the size of a softball.

I’ve had very little trouble with insects, except for the squash vine borer that killed one of the plants on the side of the garden nearer to the house. I’ve killed three or four adult squash bugs, but so far, I’ve seen no signs of their leathery, red-brown eggs, which they like to lay in several angled rows on the undersides of young leaves. The yellow-and-black cucumber beetles, which came by the hundreds last year, have been nearly absent—I’ve seen one striped beetle and one spotted beetle. The nasturtiums I planted next to the squash and cucumbers might be at least partly responsible for these insects’ absence, as their repellent effect is advertised nearly everywhere I’ve looked for information, but I think the general health and better nutrition of the plants also has helped. The gardening manuals say that weaker plants tend to attract heavier infestations of pests.

The watermelon and muskmelon plants have made similar advances across the flowerbeds, but the progress of the muskmelons has been checked by my archenemies, the infernal, unstoppable rabbits. The plants are too big to be seriously damaged by the nighttime nibblers, but nearly all of the ends have been clipped off with the greatest efficiency. An untutored eye, roving over those plants, might assume that the gardener herself had decided to prune those vines to keep them under control. This gardener, however, operating under the assumption that larger plants will support healthier and more numerous melons, would far prefer to have the vines wander at will.

So far, dressing the vine tips with cayenne pepper-laced vegetable oil has provided temporary relief for the plants, but the oil seems to cause the leaves to scorch in the sun, and the cayenne washes away each time the plants are watered or rained on. Gazing at last night’s damage (after a heavy rain), I felt rather hopeless. I’ll continue apply the mixture just to the ends of the plants, and I’ll stick some of the other growing tips inside the chicken-wire cages that I used to cover the young peppers and eggplants.

It pleases me to see my monsters grow over wide swaths of soil and fence, to try to train the unruly cucumbers up their trellis, and to watch the bees compete for places inside their bright yellow flowers. A few of the cucumbers are almost ready to pick. They appeared beneath the vines almost by magic and seemed to grow overnight from the size of a piece of chalk to nearly a foot long and an inch and a half in diameter. On the muskmelon plants, I have observed three swelling, furry, oblong objects, the largest of them about the size of my fist. None of the watermelon plants have produced viable fruits of any size as yet, though I see a few marble-sized objects that look promising.

Important though these fruits will be at harvest time, the expanding leaves—the many fingered, rough-looking leaves on the watermelon; the broad, slightly rippled leaves of the cantaloupe; great, smooth squash leaves approaching dinner-plate size; and the roughly triangular, dark-green, furry cucumber leaves—are what bring me joy right now. These ramblers and climbers take a lot of space and a lot of effort to grow, but every garden should have at least one monster to support the gardener’s ego and to impart to the entire project the luxuriant, almost decadent, appearance of success.

A Tale of Two Trellises

My neighbor, the Man with the Perfect Lawn, built his trellis a few weeks ago. As usual, I’m playing catch-up—rather lamely, it would seem. We both were dissatisfied with last year’s yield of bush beans, so each of us decided to plant pole beans this year. Naturally, to grow pole beans, one needs a beanpole.

Lawn Man tried teepee trellises for his cucumbers last year and didn’t like them. This year, he has nailed together a tough-looking structure from two-by-fours. He’s a construction worker by trade. While I’ve wielded a hammer from time to time, I have little confidence in my ability to cobble together wood-frame structures. Instead, I chose materials I could easily lift and created a rickety trellis of my own from bamboo poles tied together with a kind of nylon twine that has an annoying tendency to fray on first contact.

I think this will work for the beans, but I’m not so sure about the peas and cucumbers. All the books I’ve consulted recommend nailing up netting that the peas can climb. As for cucumbers, my family has always grown them on the ground, where they trailed limply for about six feet or so. These cucumbers produced adequately, but they were never wildly successful. I’ve also had thoughts about training winter squash on my trellis, but the idea has begun to seem impractical. If the vine doesn’t climb up the thing automatically, why waste time tying up each tendril?

The melons, meanwhile, must go elsewhere. In 100 square feet of space, it’s hard to keep plants apart from each other. According to The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, Edward C. Smith’s guide to organic gardening in raised beds, melon plants should not be allowed to mingle with cucumbers. Smith claims that melons pollinated by cucumber flowers will taste bitter. I’m not entirely sure I believe that, but planting cucurbits apart from each other makes sense to me.

Last year, I planted the cucumbers, melons, and squash together in the same infertile plot. The poor soil quality guaranteed that anything planted there would fail to thrive, but the cucumbers, at least, produced a few odd-shaped specimens. The winter squash died, and the zucchini struggled, producing only male blossoms. Both were early and frequent victims of squash bug infestation. Squash bugs prefer squash, but they don’t mind dining on cucumbers and melons. Thousands of tiny, yellow cucumber beetles, both spotted and striped, also descended on my poor, struggling plants.

I’m hoping that if I keep apart the squash plants and banish the zucchini to the front yard and the melon to the flowerbeds, the insects will be forced to divide their time among three separate locations, reducing the damage they inflict in any one spot. So my trellis will host only the beans, peas, and cucumbers, and the squash and melons will be left to find their own way.