4 steps to defeating the dreaded squash vine borer

hey guys it's Peter with the garden family today I'm gonna tell you four ways that we effectively stopped squash vine borers from killing our plants year after year come on over here let's go look at our zucchini plants and I'll tell you all about them all right so the four different ways that we are going to combat the squash vine borer is we're gonna start them undercover we're gonna grow them vertically we're gonna prune all but the newest leaves and we are gonna have to inspect our plants every day before we get into the details of each one of those steps let's talk a little bit about the squash vine borer the squash vine borer is a daytime moth it so flies around during the day at the same time that the pollinators are flying around and it will lay a very small strawberry seed sized egg on the leaves and the stems of the plant in about a week that egg will hatch into a small larvae that will burrow into the stem of the squash plant the squash plant stems are hollow so it allows it to sort of hide in there eat get bigger and eventually make its way down to the main stem of the plant and eat it from the inside out and generally you don't even know that this is happening until it's too late and your plants die so let's talk a little bit about the first step which is to start your plants under cover so we actually just took it off but we we started this plant with a row cover and the row cover covers the plant it doesn't allow any insects to come in and initially when you're growing these squash plant you're you're gonna get little to no fruit production you might get a male flower here and there but generally not much fruit production and those small stems are very susceptible to the squash vine borer they're they're not very tough the larvae can easily to them so what we do is for the first three to four weeks of the plant's life it's just covered with a with a fleece row cover this allows the plant to get large to get sort of to you know prime fruit fruit bearing production maturity and keeps it fully protected from the squash flying board during that time so step number two was to grow them vertically as you can see here this plant looks a little different than normal and you can see it's kind of got this long stem and that stem is being grown up this steak that I have in the ground what this does is it allows the leaves to be off the ground and it allows us to eat more easily inspect each one of the leaves and the stems in order to see the small eggs as they're laid on them on the plant step three was to prune the plant regularly so as you can see again we have pruned all of these bottom branches here and that includes these you know these male fruit stocks or male male flower stocks and what that does is it again it brings all of the leaves off off the ground and it allows us to inspect the plant much more easily the other thing I found is it does take about a week for the eggs to hatch these squash plants are so fast-growing that these leaves a lot of these leaves are less than a week old and in a mature plant this stock is so thick down below that the immature larvae have a hard time eating through this this stop the main stock but how they get there is they attach to one of the smaller branches go to the hollow stem and then make their way to the base stock at that point they're much bigger and they able to get inside and cut off the vascular supply of the plant step number four as I said is you got to inspect your plants every day this is probably the biggest pain in the butt again you have about a week window to find the eggs and remove them it definitely helps removing a lot of the extra leaves because you can imagine if all of these leaves were on this plant it would be very very difficult to inspect each leaf and I found it doesn't really inhibit you know fruit production or anything like that to to remove the older the older leaves so I actually haven't inspected the pumpkin plant that I have over here so let's go ahead and look over there and see what we can find and see if any squash vine borers visited us today so I have this volunteer pumpkin next to my compost pile and you can see one of the things I've done with this pumpkin plant is grow vertically similar to the squash plant so have it going up this this pole here and then it's gonna travel along the fencing that I have to keep my compost pile in and this allows me to look underneath the plant look at each leaf and really inspect for the squash vine borer eggs so the first thing I'm going to do here because I haven't done it in a bit is it actually going to remove a lot of these bottom bottom leaves not too worried about removing male flowers at this point because they don't have any female flowers open and each time I remove one I kind of look around they tend to like to congregate right at the stem leaf transition and just to kind of see you know have I had any squash vine borers a visit today or did I miss any yesterday when I looked and actually right here I can see two eggs squash Bangor eggs on this male flower okay so then this male flower here you can see these two tiny dots those are squash vine borer eggs and when I remove this flower stock one of the things you notice and got out of focus here there we go is the the flower stock itself is hollow and that's where the squash vine borer is going to burrow in through this tender stem and eventually they'll come into the main stalk of the plant once it gets there it'll just start eating away the inside of the plant and it'll it'll be a goner so in a week this would have basically started the end of this pumpkin plants life well hopefully that gave you a good overview of the squash vine borer and our approach to to getting rid of them it definitely it's a lot of work I'm in the garden every day looking for these but it is manageable it is possible to grow squash in the Midwest without losing your your squash plants one thing I should say is this butternut squash that's over my head here while it it can be attacked by squash vine borer it is much more resistant to it so if you're having trouble and une you're having trouble growing these there are some resistant varieties including butternut that that you might be able to grow successfully happy gardening everyone

Channel: The Garden Family

Views: 29,749

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Id: yit40ECBabo

Length: 8min 54sec (534 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020