Joy,

The like to hide in a cool spot during the heat of the day and at night. Place a board or shingle on the ground close to your squash plants. They'll congregate under it to stay cool. Go out there early in the morning and then again in the heat of the day and lift up the board and quickly step on all of them and kill them. You also can carry a bowl of soapy water out to the garden and use your hand (wear a glove if touching bugs bothers you) or a stick to knock the squash bugs into the water where they'll drown. You can pick them off with a gloved hand and drop them on the ground and step on them, but they'll emit a really bad odor.

Check the back of each leaf for eggs and remove the eggs. You can either drop the leaf with the eggs into a ziplock bag and put it in the trash, or scrape the eggs off into a plastic bowl with soapy water.

Mulching helps, especially if you put cardboard, newspaper or landscape fabric down on the ground around the plants and cover it with hay, straw, chopped leaves, grass clippings or some other kind of mulch.

I've linked some other squash bug control methods below. For me, the board works pretty well as does removing the eggs. Once they've hatched, they're good at hiding so I have the best luck when I keep them from hatching.
I lost two squash plants to squash bugs in early May, but my remaining 10 plants are fine so far, and that's pretty unusual. By this late in the summer, squash bugs and squash vine borers usually have killed all my plants.

Good luck,

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Squash Bug control

I've come to accept nothing short of nuclear bombs will kill those suckers. Maybe not even that will do the trick.

Btw, I tried your board trick earlier this year, Dawn. I think had a defective board.

Man, I hate squash bugs. They're the Bermuda grass of the bug world.

Diane

Hey, Diane, the board trick usually works for me, but with insect pests you just never know. I'm sorry it doesn't work for you. This year, I've had a serious squash bug problem on the screened-in back porch where they congregate and hang out on the exterior door and on some of the screened windows. What is that about? There's no squash plants on the back porch (no plants whatsoever) so why they like to hang around there I do not know!

Now, here's a brief tale to amuse you. Because of space issues (those darn tomatoes took up more space than I counted on, if you can imagine that), I was almost out of space in the garden when I got around to planting zucchini and summer squash. So, I had to plant them in the same place I had them last year, or not plant them at all. Knowing that planting squash in the same place two years running pretty much guarantees squash bugs and SVBs will attack the plants, I ruefully planted them in that spot, "knowing" I would have major pest issues with those plants this year.

As insurance, I planted two yellow crookneck squash plants in Maddie's little Peter Rabbit Garden.

So, OF COURSE, the squash bugs immediately hit and killed the two back-up plants in Maddie's little garden, which is in its first year as a garden (last year it was just bermuda grass and Johnson grass). On the other hand, my non-rotated squash plants are alive and well and have had neigher squash bugs or squash vine borers. Try explaining that one!

They do, however, look hot and tired and spider mite infested, so I think I may yank them out and plant new ones for fall in that same spot. Next year I'll try harder to rotate them someplace else.

Dawn

No! Those stupid bugs are not allowed to hurt anything in Maddie's garden! That is very not cool. Now I hate them even more, if that's at all possible.

Diane