Earlier this year, I planted several yellow crookneck squash. I’d been told that squash and tomatoes are hard to grow here and that crooknecks were a good option for this warm, humid climate. I figured that if squash was prolific in normal circumstances, maybe here, where they’re harder to grow, the plants would produce a nice, usable amount of squash.
The seeds sprouted, flowered, and fruited. I harvested a couple of squash and ate them. And then I noticed that there was something wrong with the squash. There were big orange blobs inside the blossoms and perfectly round holes drilled into the fruit. Was this the fruit fly damage that so many people had told me about? After much internet searching and with the help of one gardener on the Attainable Sustainable Facebook page, I identified the problem: pickleworm. This is not something that I’d ever heard of before and it turns out there hasn’t been much success with organic control. I spent several days over the course of the week culling the damaged fruit and smashing eggs and pickleworms. Today I discovered that there were even eggs inside the stems of a couple of plants and every single fruit was infested.
This 2" squash had six pickleworms inside!
So I pulled the plants out. It doesn’t make any sense to take up precious space with a plant that’s going to struggle to produce. Squash are not my very favorite vegetable. They’ve always been a part of my garden, but that’s because they’ve been so painless to grow – stick a seed or two in the ground and in a couple of months there’s enough for the entire neighborhood. Clearly, that’s not the case here.
I’ll be doing some research locally, talking to farmers who grow squash successfully, to find out if they’re doing so organically. Maybe they’ll share some tips that will inspire me to try again.
Is there something that you’ve given up growing because it just doesn’t thrive in your region?
Sorry to hear that. Those are some nasty looking buggers. I’ve not heard of the pickleworm before. Are they laying eggs inside the fruit? Most caterpillar types can be organically controlled with Bt – which is a protein they can’t digest if eaten. It looks like they are eating the inside of your fruit, but what about the leaves? Its the leaves that you could apply Bt to but if they are only boring into the fruit and eating I’m at a loss.
Melissa, I *think they’re laying the eggs inside the open blossoms. Then as the blossom dies off and the fruit grows, the worm tunnels into the fruit from the blossom end, in most cases.
EW! I’ve been plagued with tomato hornworms (I’ll be blogging about it soon) and I thought my having an herb garden nearby would have been enough of an organic control. The herbs are supposed to attract wasps that lay eggs on the hornworms, the wasp larvae allegedly will take out the hornworm.
I plucked off a couple of the worms and tossed them into the compost where they’re free to consume whatever else they want.
That wasn’t working. These curious mini-grenade-looking pellets were at the base of my tomato containers (they were easy to see on the concrete patio). They are the hornworm droppings! Which meant there was one still chowing down. After washing away a batch of the droppings from the patio, the next morning there was more, along with the top 20% of my prolifically-producing grape tomato plant GONE.
I threw in the towel and applied Safer Soap which seemed to do the trick. I didn’t want to — but overnight the dead worm was lying at the base of the grape tomato plant.
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Patricia, I know those little grenade shaped droppings very well! I’ve never been inspired to spray for tomato worms. I look for signs all the time and consider it a personal mission to find them and feed them to my hens!
I can SO sympathize. I have given up on zukes because of the squash vine borer. There seems to be a colony of them here on our corner of Cape Cod
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That’s pretty gross! It’s hard to imagine zucchini and crooknecks not growing somewhere as they are extremely prolific here. But then, we can’t grow mangoes or pineapple. There is always a trade off I suppose!
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This year we had moved across the country to a totally different climate, so I took the opportunity to try a new gardening method. I read the All New Square Foot Gardening book by Mel Bartholomew (the all new part is important. 25 years later there are many improvements). I’m re-reading it right now, and I read two things in there that might help with your squash and gopher problems. For the gophers, he attaches chicken wire to the bottom of the boxes so the gophers can’t dig up into your garden. For the squash bugs, he shows how to build a simple frame you can put over your box that has your squash plants, and you can cover it with cheesecloth or something similar to prevent the bugs from laying their eggs. I’m having great success using his methods, and while I haven’t tried those two particular suggestions, I thought of your posts when I read them. Since you have year-round good weather, they are things you can try whenever you want.
[...] my squash crop hasn’t done very well this year, and I’ve been so sad to not have zucchini to make more [...]
I struggled with pickleworm last year, but my Tromboncino didn’t seem to be affected. It’s my solution to the squash vine borer as well, and is much more tolerant of the powdery mildew that takes out my other squash.