Re: Need help with squash bugs

On 12/7/2010 4:56 PM, Brian Taylor wrote:

Thought I'd throw out a subject that we might talk about in the off season.
And indeed, from my perspective the off season is when you need to go after the little buggers if you have a big problem with them. I don't do sprays except for insecticidal soap which doesn't do anything to squash bugs.
I'm pretty much organic and my advice will be counter to a lot of what you get, no doubt. ;-)
Squash bug adults can winter over in your yard, so the time to get rid of them is winter. They hide out in wood piles, wood storage buildings and "spare" wood you keep around for projects. I assume they could winter over in metal buildings, but they preferred the wooden one at my old place (I had both). On a warm day in winter they will be out soaking up the heat on the undersides of any plywood and such you have lying around or leaning around, so then is the time to go out and eradicate them. I stomped mine - which I won't do in summer.
If you stomp on squash bugs in the growing season, the pheromones released call all the other squash bugs within scent range over for free lunch. In summer I drown them in a jar of water. They may release pheromones in winter, but they didn't seem to attract more bugs. I went out every time it was warm and turned over my scrap wood and stomped bugs. The first time I got hundreds, the times after that I only got a few, the last time - none. The next year I started my squash late, and my neighbor had hers in the ground weeks before I did. I didn't even SEE a bug until September that year and I look hard.
Clean up all your squash plants and GET RID OF THEM rather than leaving them in the garden or composting them. Burn them or send them to the landfill. They can harbor pests through the winter.
If you plant trap plants, make sure those plants are planted well away from your main plants and start them as early in the season as you can, then put your main plant(s) in as much later as you can.
I pick any bugs I see in the growing season and drown in a jar. Even though I have a watering system, I will occasionally take the hose around and water the ground around the pumpkins/squash vines, squash bugs will move away from the water and their movement attracts my eye so I can find them. If I find eggs on the undersides of leaves, I will scrape them off into the jar of water I use to drown adults. If they won't scrape off I'll punch out that piece of leaf and drop it in the water. I don't see that it hurts the plant any - but having said that, I rarely grow AGs, I grow a whole bundle of types of squash most years, and everything I grow including the AGs is meant to be food for me or my livestock. If someone offered me pesticide grown AGs for my livestock to eat I would have to refuse. That pesticide would end up in me or someone else sooner or later since I have dairy goats and I eat my culls that aren't good enough to sell as breeding stock.
If you can get rid of the adult squash bugs in your immediate area early, they don't seem to get unmanageable. Once I moved, I didn't have many squash bugs the first year. Of course I did by the time the second year rolled around, but I caught like 13 early in the season. I was convinced I was going to have a terrible year for them, but those 13 seemed to have been the population that overwintered, and since I got them, there were no more until August.
On chickens (and guineas, for that matter) they do eat bugs, but no matter what you read to the contrary they WILL scratch and dust bath to the point of burying your plants or digging them up/breaking off growing tips and all manner of other things. If you wanted to build a pen outside your pumpkin patch that went all the way around it and put chickens or guineas in there, they would probably do a number on a bunch of bugs, but most bugs, including squash bugs, can fly; so I'm not sure how much help they would be.
Don't take winter off if you have a big squash bug problem! Take action early and you'll have a much easier time of it in the growing season. :-) 

Good luck!
Morgan

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