Foiling the Squash Vine Borer; Great Stuff Foam on Squash Vines?

I am thinking of experimenting with one plant to keep away the vine bores. Anyone ever heard of spraying the base of the vine with this Great Stuff foam insulating spray? Wonder if it would be toxic or suffocate the plant? The foil attempt is a lot of work and the vine keeps growing past it.

Well its certainly not organic and I would expect it may, in the end, strangle the plant to death.

This may have some usefulness. It is flexible after application and can easily be removed.

http://www.henryschein.com/self-adherent-wrap-bandages.aspx

This post suggests burlap.
http://www.bhg.com/gardening/pests/insects-diseases-weeds/stop-squash-vine-borers-in-your-garden/

+1

Like Camp said, applying a rigid foam to the stalk would prevent the plant from growing, thus probably killing it or stunting it's growth.

Also, I understand that plants, like us, breathe through their "skin".  If you apply that foam sealer, you are effectively sealing off the plant's pores if you will.   

The foil & hosiery & other things that are suggested to ward off SVB create a barrier between the insect and the plant but don't clog the plant's pores.

And do you want to eat the product of a plant that's potentially been absorbing the chemicals that are in that stuff?

HTH & good luck!

I hate the SVB with a passion!

So this year I'm trying something I read in the New Victory Garden book, put a square of silver foil under each plant.

He didn't know if the light from the bottom confused the moth or if the solar reflection cooked the seeds, but it worked.  So I'm trying it, along with growing the squash on the other side of the house from previous years.  If I can remember which thread I posted in, will report back with the results. 

CC

Had problems with them this year too. What a great idea to use the foil! I am definitely going to try that and see if it helps. Nasty critters, did not know what they looked like, but now I do. Thanks for posting the pics.

I 'm going to try that too.I put foil around my yellow  squash plant stem, but I like this flat foil idea. I wonder if it will confused the squash bug. I'm going to plant  garlic around the base to see if that will keep them out since they like to harbor at the base of the plant.
great pictures capecoddess

CC, did you ever try the flat foil deterrent?  If so, how did it work?

I've just lost one of my zucchini vines to the dreaded borer nemesis.

GB

I forgot about this method. Yes, did it work?

No, the foil did not work. But I may have placed it under the plants too late. The eggs may have already been laid by the time I got the foil under them. Or the borers may have already burrowed into the plants and I didn't see it. This year I wrapped netting around the base of the plants as soon after they sprouted as I could. I'm not sure if it works yet or not as I planted so late, trying to out calendar him, and the plants are still tiny.  

Last year I tried sticking straight pins through the stems after I saw the frass. I had read that that works but it doesn't. Unless I did it too late and they had already damaged the plants enough to kill them.. or maybe too many pin holes killed them.

Another year I was so mad that I made a hole above where I thought the borers might be and squirted dish soap down into the stem. They came out their original hole and died but the plants did also.

In my first year I tried the operation thing. You slice open the stem, get them out, put the stem back together and bury it under the dirt and it's supposed to reroot. The plants died. Apparently I'm not a very good surgeon.

Something's gotta work. Every year I say I'm never going to plant squashes again and every year I try.

CC

CC, It sounds like you have a love-hate relationship with the SVB, sort of a Caddyshack relationship.

I'm sorry to hear the foil didn't work.

An article I recently read suggested injecting stems with beneficial nematodes.  The author didn't provide more detail, so I interpreted the action as "flooding" the hollow of the already damaged stem. The environment is moist enough to keep the nematodes alive - but I don't know if they would kill the grubs quickly enough to prevent significant damage or death to the plant.  Might be worth a try....



To further define the thought, as an early intervention measure, I wonder if injecting the main stem before there's visible borer damage would allow for distribution of nematodes through the entire stem system, such that larve would be infected as soon as they start burrowing.  Of course, the intervention would have to be well-timed, so the nematodes wouldn't starve before the larve appeared.


Has anyone tried this?

That's intense. I'm not positive but it seems to me that there are different nematodes that destroy different kinds of bugs and grubs. You have to get the right nematode to kill the borer larvae.  And, like you said, somehow keep it fed and alive until it's time to do its job.

Another thing to try would be to keep succession planting the zucchinis, delicata, Patty pans or whatever in hopes that the svb won't be able to get them all and will eventually be gone when the later ones  are coming up. But you'd have to have a lot of space.  Maybe I'll try that next year.
CC

I tried the surgery thing too, and no, it doesn't work.  

Have you moved the whole squash bed, CC?  Is it the larvae from the prior season that get into the stems?  Or just freshly laid eggs?

Scorpio Rising wrote:I tried the surgery thing too, and no, it doesn't work.  

Have you moved the whole squash bed, CC?  Is it the larvae from the prior season that get into the stems?  Or just freshly laid eggs?

I'm not sure where the borer moths are coming from. But I move the beds every year. This year I've spread them out so they are all over. A couple years ago I grew the squash in pots of straight compost on the other side of the house.

Scorpio Rising wrote:I tried the surgery thing too, and no, it doesn't work.  

Have you moved the whole squash bed, CC?  Is it the larvae from the prior season that get into the stems?  Or just freshly laid eggs?

SVB overwinters as cocoons in the soil, and then they emerge as adult moths that can fly from one bed to another: It's freshly laid eggs.

My zucc got SVB'd, but I caught it early - pre-wilting. I was removing mildewed leaves off my neighboring yellow squash, and noticed something strange where the leaf attaches to the stem (not where the stem attaches to the 'trunk', oddly). Cut it open - Borer. Immediately checked my zucchini trunk. Frass. They apparently laid above my foil wrapping, and I think at a seam where I must not have quite overlapped.

Did surgery. I slit parallel with the way it grows, so as to avoid severing veins running through the trunk. Used a toothpick to go in and pry outwards, managed to extract 3 borers. Smaller than the ones I removed when I did surgery last year. I hope I got all of them, I didn't want to do further damage by prying open the stem to get a good look. I wrapped the wound with plastic wrap because it felt right (also, hard to bury the stem because it's in an Earthbox). It's been over 48 hours, no wilting, so I think I'm good to go... except for the mildew.

CapeCoddess wrote:
I  grew the squash in pots of straight compost on the other side of the house.

how did that go?

Yay Beetles!!!  

You took a more "laparoscopic " approach, Beetles.  I was doing a more open approach.  I think I did too much damage to the plant....fingers crossed!

has55 wrote:

CapeCoddess wrote:
I  grew the squash in pots of straight compost on the other side of the house.

how did that go?

They got hit and died after producing one fruit each.    Those are them in the photo at the beginning of this thread.

Beetles, nice job. I tried micro surgery, too, but at first I found that I missed some borers further up and the plants died. So any following surgeries when up and up, finding borers, until I hit the solid part. Guess it was too much for the plants.
CC

Yeah, my post-op plants did not do well at all.  

The move to the raised beds/SFG changed my luck.  I had tried for 8 or 9 years to get my beloved Patty pans to grow here in the dirt.  No go.  Number 1:  dirt is bad and clay and number 2: I had no idea what was wrong until like the 5th or 6th year when all my flowering plants would just start dying.....grrrrr.  But the SFG fixed it...for now.  (Fingers crossed emoticon)

Sounds like surgery is only an option for patients with small infections that are caught early. I don't know if there isn't a big population where I am, or if I've just been lucky. There's a farm down the road that grows pumpkins. I'd figure there be a lot of SVB resulting from that. Maybe they spray and I accidentally benefit. CC, Do you have any organic pumpkin growers near you?

The zucchini is still alive, though it's losing additional leaves to the mildew.

Argh, the dreaded powdery mildew. I bought a few seeds of Dunja zucchini because it's supposed to be resistant but I haven't been able to confirm that yet because apparently it's not SVB resistant.

So I was walking by the yellow crookneck squash this morning and the leaves looked a little limp. I thought it might due to the netting, that I had wrapped around the stem, holding water on the leaf stems. Lo and behold behold the SVB got it. There was a little entrance hole down at the bottom and frass everywhere. I did notice the netting seemed to be moved down a little bit sometimes and I had to pull it back up and tighten it. How SVB ever got it that low I don't know. Must have pulled down the netting with its little SVB hands. Grrrrrrrrrr. Another experiment bites the dust.

Oh by the way, whoever sent me these seeds would you please PM me? I neglected to write down who they're from and I wanted to give you a happy update.

So I emailed my county extension office asking for the approximate date that SVB stops laying eggs in my area. They don't know but sent me this interesting link:

http://www.extension.umn.edu/garden/insects/find/squash-vine-borers/