Squash Shots

Remember the year we gave out squash at Thanksgiving?  Buy a jar of honey and get a free squash?  Well, we have not had a good squash harvest since that fateful year.  Our poor squash plants have been plagued by a variety of pests from the squash bug to the striped cucumber beetle.  By far the worst one though is the dreaded squash vine borer.  These bugs are awful and they really do decimate the plants.

This year we vaccinated our squash and zucchini plants against the squash vine borer.  Using a hypodermic needle, we shot up each plant with 1cc of bacteria juice (the biological insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis v. kustaki). After last year's abysmal squash crop, hopefully this, combined with crop rotation and intentionally planting more pest resistant cucurbit varieties, will get us back on the zucchini train.  

We have to repeat everyone's squash shots again in ten days from now but for the time being, all of our squash and zucchini plants are a little bit more protected from one of the bugs trying to bring them down.