One must attack back , and right quick too I mean ! I went to check soil moisture this afternoon and found eggs ... and then baby bugs . As much as I hate to use it the only thing in my arsenal that has worked is some old carbamate based Sevin . I did a thorough check and found and destroyed lots of eggs , followed by a spray on top and bottom of all the leaves at the recommended concentration . That knocked them down a few weeks ago and I haven't seen any until today . A question about their eggs . Some of the eggs I found today were a light tan color rather than the dark reddish brown . I'm wondering if those eggs were dead . They did seem a little crumbly when I crushed them ... This is the opening shot of Bug War 2024 , and I am readying my counterattacks ! Next wave is probably Japanese beetles , I need to get the attractant in the traps in the next few days before they arrive - I may dodge that bullet this summer since I applied beneficial nematodes in the early spring . Can't forget about the squash stem borers and hornworms ! The Sevin should take care of the former , the latter aren't usually a big problem if I keep watch for them . I need to check my Bt selection , I might have an organic solution for the hornworms .
When squash bugs attack
Jun 27, 2024
Last reply: 2 years ago
2 Replies
Snag wrote: ...
i get out in the early morning and scan for them. looking for fresh droppings on the ground and then looking up tends to locate most of them and if i miss them one day i can usually find them the next. once in a while something must be eating them because after i find them and drop them on the ground cut in half they'll be gone the next time i'm out there. no idea what it is.
last year i didn't have a single one of them that i recall. first time in a long time. previous year i had maybe 30.
for JB's i'm trying to train the birds to eat them by picking them off the plant and crushing their heads with my fingernails and leaving them on the ground by the plants. either they become fertilizer or something eats them. i never get all of them, but i grow a lot of beans and a lot of the beans seem to survive and give fresh beans or dry beans even if some of the leaves are chewed up.
with all the grass and soybean fields around here i'll never get rid of them and i sure would not put up any kind of attractant because i'd have to then deal with emptying buckets and buckets of them and having to dispose them on a regular basis. if i had that kind of time... it'd probably make a good fertilizer but you have to make sure they're dead as i've found out that trying to drown them even in soapy water that they can recover even after being in the water for quite some time. i was taking them and tossing them at the end of the driveway but a bit later i noticed one day that a lot of them were crawling away (so all my efforts at picking them was pretty much just moving them to another location). so that's when i changed my method to make sure they were dead and not going to come back alive.
songbird
I'm optimistic that the nematodes got most of them while they were grubs ... I also spent a lot of time in years past picking them off in the early mornings . I was mostly knocking them off the plants into an ice cream bucket with soapy water . Worked fairly well until late summer when their numbers pretty much exploded . The traps are set up a hundred feet or more from the garden so not to attract them to what I'm trying to protect .
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