A Win in the Pest Wars

Growing food also means fighting for it. You may or may not have trouble with humans who want to “share”, but you will absolutely have insects trying to burrow into your foods. Salty and I don’t use manufactured pesticides, which doesn’t help in this regard; but it is good practice for producing food when the stores aren’t available. This year we’ve discovered a good tool against a pest that’s ruined more of our production than any other: The squash beetle.

Recognizing the pest

Squash beetles completely trash some of the biggest food producers in a midwest gardens: summer squashes. Zucchini are the favorite meal of this pest. They’ll also kill off winter squashes (such as acorns and butternut) and, just occasionally, melons. The frustrating thing about this pest is the speed of its attack. 

One day when your zucchini are doing great and the first of the crop is coming in. The next the whole plant is wilted and well on its way to dead. When you look close, there are the squash beetles — usually mating, the dogs. There are also holes chewed into the stems near the base, which was the means of the kill.

This is what the adult squash bugs look like.

Worse, if you check on the undersides of the leaves of the dying plant or any others nearby, you see the eggs that will soon hatch into hundreds of new pests. Historically, my summer squash crops have gone from ‘all’s well’ to ‘apocalypse now’ for the whole crop in less than a week.

The eggs of this pest are most often found on the underside of the leaves.

Score: Pest 5, Salty and Spice 0

We tend to grow a lot of zucchini. It dehydrates beautifully, making chips that add pleasant crunch and can be used to scoop up salsa or other dips. The squash bugs have ended up getting all but the best hidden of plants most years. We do keep pesticide (Sevin) on hand for emergencies, but in normal times we’d rather get late-season zukes from neighbors than have the Sevin in our own garden. Squash bugs are a pest that keeps on giving. 

We’ve tried many remedies. Here are what we were told, and how it worked:

“Just drown the bugs.” They’re easy to catch and don’t bite, so they’re easy to drown. But it’s always too late.

“Crush the eggs on the leaves.” Also easy. But there are so many leaves, and they’re laid in many, many small patches. Some have escaped us, every time.

“Garlic oil and hot pepper is a great home-made insecticide!” Anytime I’ve gotten it strong enough to stop the bugs, it has burned the plants. Not a fan.

“Plant some squashes later in the season.” This one had some success, as I replanted after the first wave of plants had died and their remains been thoroughly purged. We did miss the heart of the season though.

“Neem oil is a natural insecticide.” And so it is. As long as you put it on early and often, it works. Miss one morning after a rain and the jig is up.

Is this post on pest control, or baking?

This year the first beetles showed up by wilting an acorn squash plant and part of a zucchini  in one night. We were debating whether to let them go and buy zukes for the rest of the season when Salty decided to do another search for less toxic solutions. He found one we hadn’t seen before: self-rising flour.

What?!? Yeah, they claimed the beetles would eat the flour. Plausible, certainly. Then the yeasts in the flour (that’s the self-rising part) get moist in the pest gut and expand, doing bad things to the beetle.

Honestly, I didn’t like this solution’s chances. Still, it was harmless and cheap, so we gave it a go. I used an old parmesan cheese shaker bottle filled with the flour. I shook a lot of it over the main stems of all the squashes, since that’s the pest’s favorite spot. The leaves got a bit too, because why not? The dead acorn also got treated, as I knew its leaves would soon hatch out a host of babies to colonize other plants.

Too late for this acorn squash, but two days later its hatchlings were on (and probably eating) the flour.

Finally, the pest loses a round

When we got back from a brief trip two days later, I went to check out the garden. Wait, what? The zuke plant that had begun wilting away wasn’t full dead as expected. The nearby plants were showing just a few egg patches. By now I’d expected them to be in full wilt.

I re-floured every other day and kept watching. It’s been two weeks. 

None of the other squashes have died! Even the originally wilted plant. In fact, there have been multiple new squashes developed and grown since the original infestation. That’s unheard of, in my experience. So I’m declaring this one a Win. Even if it doesn’t keep working forever, it has definitely helped. I still see the odd beetle.

Here’s a zucchini plant more than a week in. Lots of flour, not many bugs, not dying, still making squash.

Self-rising flour as a prep?

So how useful is this as a prep? It depends on time scale and the nature of the problem, I’d say. Self-rising flour works, as pesticide or bread fodder, because it has dormant yeast. Yeast doesn’t last forever. It’s better if refrigerated, but I wouldn’t want it to be more than a year or two old.

On the other hand, flour is very cheap. It’s also a lot easier to find in stores than is Sevin, especially in off-season. I don’t know if a purist would call it organic, but it’s close enough for me. It’s sure not toxic as manufactured pesticides are. Not only do you not ingest those potent pesticides, but neither do your pollinators. Gardens need their pollinators if they are to produce. I’m not sure Sevin would harm friendly insects, but I suspect it does. It’s very hard to manufacture a ‘bad bug only’ pesticide to start with, and most garden pesticides have wide actions.

If a lot of people decide they need to garden (Victory Gardens during WWII come to mind), you’re still likely to be able to find the self-rising flour; or bread yeast to mix with your own flour at least. 

Take that, you nasty pests! (Not that I’m bitter…)