Hunting vine borers and pruning tomatoes

Vine borers, beware. There is nowhere you can hide where I won't find you.

Even if you hide in this bag.

Before I get to the vine borers, let me just mention the squash bugs. I think this was the first time this year they laid eggs on the top side of a leaf.

I think they like the underside better because it's shady and well hidden from egg predators. As in me, because I don't know what else would have a vested interest in destroying these things. Aside from Joe the spider, of course. (But he'd probably wait for them to hatch anyway.)

They also laid, like, twenty on the bottom of this baby leaf.

 

Okay. Serious time. Vine borers are not cool. While squash bugs are annoying as all get out, and are quite scary when gathered in large numbers (I would show you a picture, but every time I turn a leaf over and find twenty little blue adolescents hanging out, I go into battle-rage mode. Doesn't happen too often when I'm checking the leaves ever couple days)-- VINE BORERS are agents of evil. Their sole purpose is to lay their eggs on the stem of unsuspecting, innocent squash plants so that their larvae can hatch and burrow into the stem, devouring the main stem from the inside out.

Since the eggs are generally too small to spot (or at least too hard for me to distinguish from dirt), my mission is to protect the main stem and monitor the rest of the plant for this sawdust looking stuff called frass that marks the place where the larva burrowed in. 

Here is an example:

This is on a pumpkin leaf (the one climbing up the porch). I dusted the very base of the main stems on my biggest plants to protect them, and I haven't seen any evidence of attacks there. With that front covered, it seems like the fork of the leaves is the next best spot for these little buggers. (Or at least that's where I've found most of them.)

If you spot the frass, all you need to do is use a clean, sharp knife to slice open the stem and dig the sucker out. I've read online about other people using wire or toothpicks or something to kill them, but I like to know my enemy is completely dead.

So here I've sliced open the leaf stem. (The pumpkin handily provided its own tourniquet.) I usually just keep slicing until I find the larva, which is kind of graphic/drastic sounding, but it's better than having it working its way down to the stem and eating the plant from the inside, I figure.

This one's super tiny. (Also, my knife is neither sharp nor clean. I'm probably spreading some horrible kind of squash vine disease by doing this.) If the larva is bigger than this, that sucks because it means it's been growing fat and healthy on your pumpkins livelihood. They get to be like an inch long at least, fully grown. Think a stubby, glisteny-white grub/caterpillar. That's what they're like.

Anyways, here's another operation.

Is an excellent example of frass. I think it's the chewed up stuff the borer leaves behind as it burrows in. Anyway, it signifies its entry point.

I usually kind of stick my knifepoint in there to do my surgery. The stalks slice very neatly along the stripes.

 I kind of majorly mangled this one, hunting for this one, but it does show how sneaky they can be.

Yeah, that was my morning. I've found maybe five or six of these in the past week and a half or so. I read online somewhere the moth that lays these eggs is only around for a couple of weeks, so there's a possibility that this will be a short lived (if intense) battle. 

Other details, if you find a vine borer in the stem along the ground, you can slice in and get it and then bury that part of the stem and water it to see if it'll root. If you miss the frass, you may be toast. You'll know you have a problem when the leaves start to seriously wilt, but thaaaat means the borers have eaten away so much of the vine that water can't get from the roots to the leaves. Which means your plant is pretty much dead.

Prevention-wise, you can bury a few of the leaf nodes along the stem so the plant has multiple rooting-points. That way if a vine borer does some serious damage, say, to the base of the main stem, the rest of the vine is still rooted and can keep the water transport thing going.

I've taken this precaution with the plant growing the giant pumpkin, but the others have grown out into the grass where it's harder to bury them, so we'll see what happens.

 By the way, here's the big pumpkin.

 

It's looking pretty ready now that I look at this picture. I guess at the time I was still in vine borer destruction mode and didn't think about it.

Also, here's Little Mac.

He's about 22-23 inches now. Growing fast.

Rocky's got him beat at 30 inches, though.

Flower bed operations have been progressing nicely. I'm starting to think the spaghetti squash might have enough time to put out a squash or two, if it lives through the vine borers and all

Here's a picture of the whole bed (well, most of it):

The dark blue circle is the blueberry bush, the orange is a peony, the purple-magenta color are irises, and the blue is the spaghetti squash.

It was cloudy and even a little drizzly, so I only weeded a little. Patch helped.

She was actually very excited about helping.

Rainbow, our gray cat, also "helped". Or rather waged chemical warfare on the weeds.

And that was when I stopped weeding for the day.

Speaking of chemical warfare, the strawberries are getting along after all and are, for the most part "plague"-less.

Remember when I mentioned re-staking the tomatoes? That also happened, the result being that instead of being a three-foot high mess of vines and leaves, I now have a five-foot high mess of vines and leaves.

The little okra plant is still chilling there with his forcefield.

While seeking wisdom on the internet, I stumbled across a discussion of how to prune tomatoes. All I gathered from skimming the page was that it was a good idea, helped the plants produce more delicious tomatoes (which may or may not be impossible, considering how amazing the ones I've already had are), and... this is how you do it.

See that little circled sucker? It's actually called a sucker! They grow out of the joint where a tomato leaf meets the vine, and if left alone turn into another huge vine. That's great if you want ten foot tall tomatoes, but if they're already rivaling the size of your back porch you can pinch them off to encourage the plant to put more effort into making tomatoes.

In theory, it makes sense. If I were a tomato and something kept pinching off little pieces of me, I'd go, "Oh, man! Better put out more tomatoes so whatever's eating me at least eats the part with seeds so I can spread to the world!"

Also, the pumpkins in the corner were climbing each other, so I hauled out one of the pallets we had leaning against a phone pole and converted it into a trellis. A... sad trellis right now, but I think it has potential.

It's totally going to look better when the leaves realize they're facing the wrong direction.

So yeah. This is the garden. Why all the pumpkins decided to ditch this perfectly good dirt and head for the yard, I do not know. But it's left lots of light for the later batch of okra, (which you can kind of see is flagged with little red flags. I made them so my dad wouldn't step on the plants by accident).

Also, here is a baby cucumber.

Grow, cucumber, grow. I don't really like cucumbers, but whatever. I've never grown them before.

Here's another pic of the grape tomatoes. You can't tell at all, but I weeded like crazy underneath them. The mint was trying to take over-- I must have pulled up, like, thirty stalks of it.

In other news, one of the pumpkins that was getting ready to be ripe turned out to have some kind of creepy mold growing on it.

 

I have no idea what this stuff is. Only thing I know is when I tried to wipe it off, the pumpkin's outer skin came off with it. Super gross. I think this one's history.

Better fated pumpkins exist, though. Not too long ago, I looked out into the yard at the decomposing haybales I use for archery practice.

See them?

At one point, I smashed a leftover pumpkin from last Halloween out there (after shooting it with arrows, which was gross but fun), and now this is growing.

The P stands for Pumpkin.

Please note, while this plant has been completely unbothered by squash bugs and vine borers so far, it's in a pretty dangerous place. Whenever Dad mows, it's delicate life hangs in the balance. Cross your fingers as to whether it lives to put out a pumpkin or not.

My final order of business was the crepe myrtle. It's safely planted and looking quite good, if I do say so myself.

That's it, if you can tell it from the grass and weeds. It's a lot greener now, at least. We'll see how it comes along in the next couple of weeks.