Getting Rid of Squash Bugs & Squash Vine Borers (IDENTIFYING, PREVENTION, and ORGANIC TREATMENT!!)

you can see behind me that the squash plants have taken over my garden it's taken me a lot of hard work to get to this point because of two major pests squash bugs and vine borers today i'm going to talk to you about what these bugs are what it means for your plants how to identify them and how to get rid of them we are alex and elena a couple in our mid-20s working towards financial independence and self-sustainability follow our journey as we grow build fix and learn the skills we need to get us there [Music] so to get started let's talk about squash bugs squash bugs look like stink bugs so if you see a bug near your plant that looks like a stink bug it is a squash bug the distinctive difference between the two is that a squash bug has a skinnier body whenever you see these squash bugs you want to take them and drown them in water you can also squish them if there's not too many but oftentimes by the point that you see that you have squash bugs your plants are infested there's one way to prevent your plants from getting infested by squash bugs and that is by finding the eggs on the underside of the leaves before they hatch the eggs themselves are in clusters of maybe 10 to 20 eggs and they are burgundy in color squash bugs only lay eggs between june the end of june and the middle of the summer so it's really important that if you plant your squash plants early that you're out there every day checking the leaves this is something that i did diligently for the first couple of weeks that my plants were out in the garden i was able to prevent multiple hatchings of the squash bugs just by finding the eggs and squashing them so that's really really important that you know what the eggs look like before they hatch one of the major signs that you have squash bugs on your plants is if you see the leaves of the plants yellowing and then they have brown spots on them so if you see that on your plant there's a good chance that you either have squash bugs or vine borers i'm going to tell you today a couple of tips to figure out which one of the pests is on your plant so if you see here this squash plant looks very very healthy but then when we look over here seems to be a lot of leaves missing and as i get closer you can see that some of these leaves are yellow with brown spots now to determine if this is a squash bug versus a vine borer you need to look at the vine of the plant itself so we haven't talked about vine borers yet but they attack specifically the vine so if there's no damage to the vine then it's a squash bug so here i don't see any damage to this vine you would usually see a brown spot on the vine itself that would be telling you that there was a vine borer so this tells me that i have some squash bugs if you find squash bugs on your plants don't get discouraged doesn't mean that your plants are done for for the season it just means that you're going to have to be very very diligent and persistent about getting rid of the bugs the best piece of advice i can give to you is to just stay consistent and to find those eggs that's gonna be your number one way to get rid of the squash bugs a little bit more about squash bugs squash bugs cause the leaves of the plant to turn yellow because they are sucking the sap out of the leaves squash bugs usually have two life cycles during each year depending on where you're at so for us whenever i get rid of these plants i'm going to make sure that i burn the compost you don't want any chance of those plant infecting your garden for next year by putting it into a compost and then using that compost in your garden one thing that i recommend is that you look up the life cycle of a squash bug once those eggs hatch they look like little tiny spiders running around so you want to make sure that you can identify what those squash bugs look like at every stage of life it's really important because they lay eggs in the tens to twenties and they can take over your plants quickly now let's talk about vine borers vine borers have been such a pain to me this year in my garden and i've been out here almost every day finding anywhere from five to ten a day and smushing them so i'm going to show you what signs you can look for for vine borers and what you can do once you find them for me i would have preferred to do this preventatively and find the eggs and smush them but i never had vine borers before this year so i wasn't aware of what the eggs looked like these eggs are the same burgundy color that the eggs of a squash bugs are but these eggs you're going to find these at the base of the vines of the plant when you see these eggs you want to squish them they are much harder to see because the moths lay them in quantities of one it's easier to see the squash bugs because they're in large clumps of quantities vine borers attack your plant by boring into the vine who would have guessed and then they block the water to the rest of the plant so if you start seeing wilting leaves or leaves that are turning discolored you might have vine borers but keep in mind you need to know the distinctive difference between vine bores and squash bugs because the damage looks relatively the same so this squash plant here the one that has three different leaves i know it's hard to tell because i have so many squash plants it was severely affected by vine borers and so what i did is i performed surgery on the plant so if you decide to go this route what you do is you take a very sharp knife and you actually cut the vine and you find the vine borer now you don't want to cut completely through the vine but you do cut it open so you can see i scored the vine and then i found the vine borer pulled it out and squished it what you want to do after that is cover up the vine with some dirt to encourage water to still get in there now these plants you have to watch very closely because you want to make sure that they are still getting plenty of water to continue to grow their fruit so right here this is vine board damage you can tell that it's vine board damage because you can see some of the meal i guess you would call it from the stem that the vine borer had to take out to get in so here is somewhere where i'm gonna have to come in and i'm gonna take a knife i'm gonna slice this i'm going to try to find the vine borer within here and i'm going to kill it and then i'm going to cover this up with dirt so that it can heal properly as well as so that there is still moisture and the plant is able to get moisture elsewhere this brown spot here is on a different plant and it's actually on the leaf stem when it's on the leaf stem i just go ahead and cut off the whole entire stem and then i cut that open to see if i can find a vine borer i didn't find a vine borer in the leaf stem so i went ahead and started looking in the main stem when i cut in the main stem i'm very careful to make sure i don't cut more than i need to all right so here's your vine board see that white body with the black head that is a vine borer this one was in a very very very early stage usually when i find them they're a lot bigger but it's good that i found it early before it did more damage to the plant this looks like vine board damage this brown spot here so what i'm gonna do i'm gonna cut this off and then i'm gonna slice this open be careful not to cut yourself when i open it up it doesn't look like there's anything but i have been dealing with vine boards for several weeks now and i can see it see the black head right here embedded within the stem there it is you see it moving around [Music] it's the white body with the black head so we're gonna smush this little baby so i recommend that you also look up the life cycle of a vine board just like the squash bug it's really important to understand when these pests are active so you can determine your planting schedule better for next year also you need to know if you're going to deal with the second round of the bugs later on mine boards typically lay eggs between late june and middle of july now that's going to change depending on what your growing season is i've been out here almost every day looking for signs of vine borers and i've been cutting open the stems and killing them as soon as i see them it's really important that you attack them aggressively because they can decimate your plants very quickly if you notice behind me i don't know if you'll be able to see this but this plant that's right around me has dealt with a ton of vine borer damage and it is still producing fruit and that's because i'm out here doing my due diligence and i'm not just giving up on the plant but in order to do that you need to know the signs of the damage of a vine borer one last thing before we go a lot of people like the quick solutions for getting rid of pests for me i found that hasn't really worked so a lot of people will use what's called neem oil to get rid of squash bugs i haven't had much luck with that i find that the best way to do it just like anything else in life is to be preventative and to get rid of the eggs before they hatch so with that i want to thank you for joining me make sure to click the like button if you like this video and subscribe to our channel for more videos similar to this i gotta get back to killing some vine wars [Music] you

Channel: Mason Dixon Acres

Views: 118,146

Keywords: #diy, #homesteading, #farming, #selfsustainable

Id: LMzjuxIrG5g

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020