Requiem For A Squash Vine

My vegetable garden is going to hell in a hand basket.  Well, not the whole garden, but the two beds in which I planted a delicata and a butternut squash vine respectively.  The vines have fallen prey to that arch-enemy of cucurbits, the squash bug.

I have been growing vegetables off and on since 1975, and this is the first time I've had a problem with bugs.  Sure, there were always a few Japanese beetles nibbling at the bean leaves, and cabbage butterflies laying eggs that would hatch into gray-green caterpillars in the broccoli, and slugs making holes in the lettuce.  But I've never had bugs come anywhere near killing a plant.

The squash bugs have.  Their first victim was the splendid delicata vine, which bore seven beautiful green-striped squashes and a dozen flowers promising more.  One day I noticed a bunch of odd-looking orange-colored eggs on top of a leaf.  The next time I looked, there were thousands of gray bugs of all different sizes hanging like bunches of grapes from the stems, the leaves, the fruit.  In a week, the plant was dead.

I picked the seven squashes, which hadn't quite reached maturity, roasted and pureed them and put them in the freezer.

Having sucked all the nourishment out of the delicata vine, the bugs have now assaulted the butternut plant.  It is full of glorious big squashes that are nowhere near ripe.  I doubt that the vine will survive long enough for them to mature.

Short of blasting them with heavy-duty insecticides, there is not much you can do about squash bugs other than pick them by hand.  I could spend the rest of the summer doing just that, but I would have to stop writing, drawing, reading, cooking, and living to dedicate myself exclusively to squashing squash bugs.

I thought that if I lived right and used plenty of compost, my vegetables would be invulnerable to pests and disease.  But it turns out that in gardening, as in the rest of life, being righteous is no guarantee of anything.  If there is any justice in the universe, when good gardeners die we will be given allotment plots in heaven where we can spend eternity growing organic veggies free from the scourges of mildew, bugs, drought, and untimely frosts.

Garden Mystery

There is a mysterious plant growing in my vegetable garden. Or rather, it's not so much the plant, which is definitely a member of the squash family, as how it got there that's the mystery.

I garden by the “square-foot” method, so my vegetable garden is small and pretty much under control. In late April I planted one bed in lettuce and arugula seeds. Neither came up, so I put in some fail-proof lettuce transplants.

Pretty soon I noticed some seedlings coming up among the lettuces. But there was no mistaking them for members of the salad family. Their cotyledons were fat and oval, their stems were thick and hairy. And their true leaves, when they emerged, were deep green and crinkly, and big.

I have compared the mystery plantlets to the zucchini that's growing in another bed, and they look similar, but not identical. They might be acorn squash, or yellow squash, or huge pumpkins that will take over the entire yard.

How did they get there?

The compost I put on the garden this spring dates from fall, 2008, when that season's acorn squash was safely stored in the basement, so its seeds could not possibly have gotten into that batch of compost.

And here's a spooky thing. All the way across the yard, against the back wall of the chicken/goat facility, I made a narrow bed in which I planted a mini variety of pumpkin, planning to train them up the wall of the shed. But the chickens got out for fifteen minutes one day and, ignoring the woods and fields all around them, made a beeline for the pumpkin patch, which they plowed up from end to end while searching for, and finding, the pumpkin seeds.

A few days later, the mystery seedlings came up in the vegetable garden. Strange, don't you think?

Of course there is no way the chickens could have ingested the pumpkin seeds, then run over and pooped them into the vegetable garden, in the few minutes they were out. Maybe they picked up the seeds and ran across the yard with them in their beaks and planted them in the garden? Chickens will do strange things sometimes.

Whatever they may be, I'm not pulling up the mystery seedlings. I'm going to transplant them somewhere, and see what they turn into. I don't know where I'll put them, as members of the squash family tend to ramble, and the last thing I want is yet another garden to take care of. But I'll think of something.