Karl's Garden Blog

Even after weeks of searching, the purchase of a magnifying glass, and stalking my garden at all hours, I’m still left wondering what in the ever loving heck is eating my Cucurbits, cabbage species, carrot tops, bean leaves, and (!!) marigolds. Whatever it is, it’s removing all the green foliage it can get it’s hands on … except for the Cucurbitaceae, which it just scars the ever loving heck out of.

My first suspicion was a squash vine borer. I had several bush zucchini plants grow like mad for a week or two, and then suddenly wilt and die.

Damage to the squash plants, which wilted from the base up.

I did find a spotted cucumber beetle in the yard, which might be the culprit. Sorry about the blurriness of this picture, it’s a little bug and I had a wide angle lens on when I managed to capture him.

Spotted Cucumber Beetle

I killed all the ones that I found, and despite some slug-like trails on the peas and eggplant, I haven’t seen any other bugs that would be the culprit. (The bugs *and* all the tender parts of the kohlrabi…) A necropsy on the dead squash revealed no signs of squash vine borers, larvae, or other varmints… the plantS just up and died. Worse: The luffa seedlings are now showing the same signs of wilt. There’s this article on Bacterial Wilt, which seems to match. So, it looks like I’m not going to have luffa this year … damn…

Now, on the surviving Bush Champion cucumber, I’m getting similar slug trails — up the stem, even. And then I found a cucumber beetle inside the first flower earlier today. (He got squished.) A careful going-over of the plant revealed no more — I checked the other plants just to be sure.

Cuke Damage -- Note the scarring in the bottom right.

The problem is that the damage to the leaves doesn’t match what the cucumber beetle seems to do… although it might be for the pupae. However, I’m going to hit up the co-op tomorrow and see if they have any Rotenone, which is an approved organic pesticide to control these beetles.