160 comments on POLL: Theoildrum.com readers and food growing...
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GAIA Host Collective
Well please tell me how to get rid of squash vine borer!!
Our squash yields have collapsed the past few years because of the #@$#@$ things. I've tried to excise them from the vines with a knife - the only solution was growing squash in manure so that it can outgrow the buggers (for a while anyways).
I just microwave the squash and eat it raw. Acorn is nice but buttercup is best - firm, dry and sweet. Butternut with sautee'd onions and garlic makes a great soup.
Squash cookies - 1c buttercup, 2c whole wheat flour, 1/4c sugar <1/4c choc chips, 1tsp baking soda, 1tsp baking powder - 350F for 15 min.
Our best squash always seem to be the volunteers that get into the soil via the compost - not the ones we start indoors and keep safe until the frost is over!
We've found that injecting Bt into the hollow of the stems works well. They sell "garden syringes" for this. I buy a pint of Bt Kurstaki concentrate every few years (I have a bottle of Bonide "Thuricide" Bt in front of me right now.) When I see frass, I inject diluted (per instructions) Bt into the stems every few feet. This is completely organic BTW, and you don't have to bury the stems afterward.
You can also spray the Bt on the stems early in the season and hope that the larvae eat some as they're burrowing in. This takes more time, since you have to do it after every rain and you may still have to inject. However, it takes only a few minutes per week and may solve the problem.
Another good method is to just wait until after the borers have flown in your area. (That's part of the reason your volunteers do so well.) You might even plant a single squash to throw away and after you see the frass, plant the rest of your squash. The adult borers only fly for a few weeks and then they're done for the year. That means that covering up the plants during that time fram so that the borer can't get to them would also work. The borers don't look at the calendar to decide when to fly, unfortunately, so you have to have a bait plant or leave it on for a month or so to be sure.
Oh, and make *sure* you get rid of any borers at the end of the season. Vines must be either composted well or burned. We chop ours up into 2" chunks to compost or just put them in our city composting bins. It doesn't hurt to stir up your beds that had squashes to look for pupal cases, either.
Thanks for the BT advice. I'm also going to try succession plantings next year.
We got the borers something awful in central Texas. They don't seem to have such a short season here. I tried the Bt method but apparently just don't have a feel for how to do it. Or the bottle of Bt I bought was no good. Sometimes we can get a few fruit off of them before the borers kill 'em off though.
i just did a little reading on the local "coyote gourd" or more commonly known "buffalo gourd" and the seeds are edible, and the stuff's a weed here. I think I'm going to snag a few next time I drive by a local patch of them and plant the seeds around our lower lying land here ..... the gourd is basically poisonous, but makes a decent soap if you have no other, the seeds can be roasted and eaten, and the dried gourds can be used to make things. And, you can do stuff with the root - get starch or brew white lightning lol.
The seeds, the way the stuff grows so well with no attention, and the way the dried gourds can be made into things, are enough reasons for me.
You mean this cucurb. It's one of my favorite native plants here in central Texas.
And probably also the natural reservoir of those ^%$&$%%! squash borer moths.
Thanks for the link to the borer, what an interesting looking bug! If I didn't know it's a moth, it'd fool me into not messing with it, since it does look like a wasp. But looking closer, it doesn't have a thin waist, and it has "tail feathers" instead of a sting.
I'm going to be on the lookout for those and "frass" on coyote gourd plants to see if they're around here.
I've never seen anyone consciously grow the coyote gourd around here, it just grows here and there as a weed. And it does well when everything else is struggling.
I haven't actually noticed any damage on the buffalo gourd plants I've examined. It just seems that the borers find our cultivated squash so quickly there must be some natural source of them. I think the wild gourds are quite resistant to that sort of attack -- non-hollow stems for example. And being poisonous probably helps.
The tuberous root of the buffalo gourd allows it to survive a hot dry spell long after most of the other non-succulent plants have died or gone into diapause.
Growing those might not be a bad non-agricultural post peak business, given lack of other petroleum based items and our cultural addiction to more
praetzel,
Be thankful if you don't have carrot root maggot, their life cycles seem to be continuous starting in mid spring to mid fall. Looking at the life cycle of that moth of yours, a covering of remay cloth, for the month I read they were active, might help.
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2153.html