NO

It is usually much harder.

Just be patient. I am 40 years without any poisons of any kind. Try to look toward your success. Your garden will keep getting better. You have to experiment and find what works for you. Up north your strategy of a 2nd planting would have worked.

In general the Butternut type squash will work. There are many kinds of C. Moschata. You can eat them as a summer squash or a winter squash. There are kinds with big vines and small bushes.

You should be able to grow melons much better than I can up north. There are all kinds of things that will work and or not work for you. You simply need to find what works for you.

Around here there are people who are devestated by SVB and other areas where the SVB does not fly and does not find the plants.

Try to look at what works and focus on that. Also recognize that the fall garden has many super advantages over the spring planting. many things have problems growing in the spring garden but will do super well in the fall garden.

Good luck. Gardening is fun. It provides a place to complain when nothing is wrong. Just never get so frustrated you ever use poisons. It is not needed no matter what people say. Just try growing something different that does not require poisons.

I believe BT will kill the SVB larvae. I would use a row cover in the spring until the squash start blooming and start applying the BT when you take the cover off. If they get in the vine you can inject BT into the stem.
Your winter melons should be fine.

Try different varieties. Some are stronger than others and seem to go much longer before they give up the ghost to the SVB. Crookneck appear to be the weakest for me so I would cover them until you see lots of female blooms and then uncover or just hand pollinate.

Yes gardening can be this hard. That's why hunger is such a problem in the third world. Just imagine what it would be like without available water.

I recommend hilling around your summer squashes...it'll encourage them to send out secondary roots, which will take over in the event that the main stem gets hit by a SVB

i have had good luck growing Cavili zucchini under cover. Since it self pollinates i do not need to remove the cover to get fruit.
i do not have SVB (yet! knock on wood) but i have read on these forums that they complete their life cycle early in the season. You are in zone 7 so GDs advice for fall planting seems to makes sense.
Gardening is only hard until you figure it out ; )

Hey, Mauirose, you got Cavili to self pollinate? After 10 or so baby squashes failed to make it to adulthood, I gave up and started hand pollinating it.

Jbrickm,
Try planting Zucchini, only for zone 7 you should be able to plant it mid April or so. That will give you a couple of weeks extra production. Then you can slit the stems to remove the svb's and bury the stem, or as someone suggested the other day, just jab a pin in the stem a bunch of times near the site and you'll probably get the little sucker.

They eventually got all my squash this year, but I got some harvest first.

Susan

SVB got all my plants also as well as the ladybug type squash beetle. will I ever be able to plant squash in that plot again? What kills off the beetles ans borers? /Abi

You can do a winter planting of some herb that attracts beneficials to overwinter,like ground beetles, they like goldenrod, but I heard it's invasive. It's easy to weed, the roots pull up fine. You can do soil solarization if you want to kill everything including maybe the worms, you have to not grow anything in that spot until the summer when it's good and hot, cover it with clear plastic, for 6 weeks or so, let the heat burn the spot.

You can plant companion plants with your plants, like dill and flowering parsley which you have to overwinter to flower, and other small shallow types of flowers, even fennel. I found a nice cucumber beetle on my fennel, so it obviously doesn't repel insects, but the flower will attract beneficial insects like parasitic wasps and flies that feed on them. Someone on here, heather38, had good luck with flowering parsley, the svbs didn't attack, and another member swore by it as well.

For next year I'm going the route of planting shasta, painted, and pyrethrum daisies around mine in a square like a fence, the flowers produce pyrethrum, the oil used as a insecticide.

I've read bread poppies repel them too, I'm trying that too next year, a bug zapper even for your garden works so I've read. Someone also said they liked her yellow porch light, so she kills them as they land at night and they are certainly less populated.

I lost all my pumpkins and squash, long neck and patty pan, to svbs. I'm now battling squash bugs this late, finding babies and smashing them on my cantaloupe. I hadn't seen any eggs and don't see where they are laying, not on the vines, but I give up on a vine that big.

I've used the bt, but it didn't do much for me. The only true method is a row cover or a screen around your plants. A person here had a nice screened in area for her squash, growing in a box, don't know if in a container or in the ground, but it seems like a nice idea.

Another suggested using a light blue foil mulch, couldn't find any unless you paint the aluminum foil light blue yourself. They are confused by the color thinking it to be the sky. They used to paint porch tops with the color as a bug deterrent.

Aluminum foil as a mulch will deter them, wraps around the stems of where touch ground might work, even wrap with foil, but it may cook your plant. Also flat mulches deters them because they live in fluffy mulches. If any of that works for you, good luck.

The advice for making your squash plant root is the best most likely thing to work. Once in the main root, you will have another way to get water and nutrients to the stem via the roots and you can cut the bad root off.

Hey, Mauirose, you got Cavili to self pollinate? After 10 or so baby squashes failed to make it to adulthood, I gave up and started hand pollinating it.

Susan maybe you got some mislabeled seeds?

Haven't seen any squash fall off yet. And this is the second planting. Where'd you get your seeds?