My zucchini have just started to be harvestable but I'm still waiting for the day when I have more zucchini than I can eat. Won't that be wonderful.
While hovering over the still-unproductive zucchini, I noticed what seemed to be 3 pests:
1) green shield bug (maybe a stink bug, I thought)
2) orange eggs on underside of leaves
3) clustered spiders (I thought)
Turns out these are all the squash bug, in various stages of development, and should ALL BE KILLED. Which should be pretty easy if you can catch them early. The eggs are bright orange, the spiders are actually squash bug nymphs and are white with black heads and legs, and the adults start out green, like a stink bug, but later turn brown/black.
Constant vigilance!
I also ate my first barely-ripe grape tomatoes today. Many more to come.
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5 comments:
Get in there and squash those squash bugs as soon as you see them! If you let those orange eggs hatch, they'll come on by the millions. We just pulled out the plants and put them in the trash. Now if we see a squash bug, we smoosh it immediately. It works like a charm. Good luck!
Come August, you'll have zucchini coming out your ears. You'll put bags of it in your neighbors' mailboxes. You'll swap zucchini-masking recipes with fellow gardeners. And it's just about the best time of the year in the garden. It'll still make you smile come January.
What do you use to kill them? Do you just literally "squash" them or is there some sort of spray you use? I'm trying to find an organic, home-made pesticide that I can use on my garden and so far I'm stumped!
I cut out the part of the leaf with the eggs and squash the nymphs and bugs. I am especially relentless when it comes to Harlequin bugs, and a thorough squashing keeps their numbers down for a few days. Too bad flea beetles are too small to kill this way effectively!
Good luck...I can never tell the bad from the good bugs..and they take over!
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