How We Beat the Squash Bugs

Last year I honestly thought we might never grow summer squash again. Funny what a difference just 12 months can make. Fickle I am and boy does gardening show it.

After reading all about how squash bugs were hard to get rid of, how they come back year after year no matter what, and how there was almost no organic method for getting rid of those guys except hours upon hours of bug squishing, I just figured maybe we wouldn’t grow the stuff.

This year, two of our main garden harvests are summer and winter squash. These guys are just so prolific, love the heat, and have thrived in our beautifully wet early summer. Dozens of quarts of summer squash are in the cellar and we’ll start moving the earliest winter squash to join those jars in the coming week or so.

So how did we go from me throwing in the towel completely last summer to possibly the biggest squash harvest we’ve had to date this year? Well, it all has to do with beating those squash bugs and turning a problem into a solution.

Letting the Animals Work

It was late summer and I was pretty much holed up in the August heat with a newborn Hannah in my arms around the clock. I had long since given up on the gardens in what was possibly the worst of our seven garden years. There was just no way I was going to get in a fall garden, I knew, so I made peace with that and snuggled up with Hannah.

Because everything died except the sweet potatoes, and because the garden needed to be cleaned up anyway, Stewart and the boys put up a fence between the sweet potato half of the garden and the other half where we plant our squash, tomatoes, greens, roots, etc. That fence allowed us to let the laying hens and the goats into the garden for several weeks.

The goats ate up the weeds and the chickens scratched and pecked and pecked some more. As you can imagine, they were scratching away at the mulch, spreading it all over and bringing all of those squash bugs out from their favorite hiding spot. And eating them… boy, were they going to town.

Pulling Back the Mulch

So basically the chickens ate them all, at least that is how it seems. But I think there was more to it than that. When I had decided that perhaps we would never grow squash again, it came as a result of reading about how squash bugs live under mulch and hide really well and don’t always die off in milder winters such as ours. So I kind of wondered if we weren’t doomed to squash bugs forever.

So once the chickens spread the mulch away from the beds and ate up all of the little buggers, we decided not to mulch again. Apparently squash bugs love to hang out in that stuff and are harder to find and harder to get rid of if mulch is around. So we pulled back the mulch when planting squash.

Stewart planted a round of squash in the fall and we had zero problems with squash bugs. I tentatively planted about a dozen summer squash this spring and a couple dozen winter squash, thinking last fall might have been a fluke. Nope, all four squash varieties have thrived and given us a bumper crop and it’s only been the last month or so that we have even spotted some squash bugs here and there.

I imagine that they will make their way back with a vengeance if we don’t do something about it, though. So I am thinking that once the tomatoes, melons, and okra have had enough come late summer, we’ll put up that fence and let the chickens have at it again before we plant a fall garden.

We also practice crop rotation, which probably helps, but previous to the chicken and mulch fix, rotation never seemed to do the trick. All of these things combined, however, really seems to have helped. And boy am I thankful for an abundance of these crops and knowing that a problem – squash bugs – can be turned into a solution I like to call chicken feed.