Squash bugs

My wife and I are gardeners. Not of any particular expertise, but definitely persistent. If I've counted our misses correctly we've been at it seventeen of the last twenty years. At nine sites in five states and six cities.¹ I believe we've only failed to garden at all in one of the eight "permanent" residences we've had in that time (a rental we occupied for less than a year).²

We grow flowers and vegatables in containers and in the ground. Roses, irises, marigolds, geraniums and others. Tomatoes, bell peppers, a variety of chilies, egg plant, leeks, beans, peas, assorted squash, selecetd herbs, occasional greens, the odd brasica and others. We use containers in rentals, when space doesn't leave us with a choice, and (in one case) when suspected soil contamination makes us unwilling to eat food grown in the ground.

By my count we've grown squash at seven of the nine sites. And we've had squash bugs in every single one of them. "Loathing" is simply not a strong enough word to describe my feelings about these little creeps.

They showed up here on Wednesday. I found them as the light was fading from the sky, and I spent almost an hour working my way through all our vulnerable plants trying to determine the extent of the infestation and to stop it. Each of the last few days has included an hour or more of fighting them, and we might be winning. It's only cost us one plant so far, which is not bad.

But the vile awfulness of these critters is not the point of this post. Rather it is the "discovery" I made that first evening.

Back-lit squash leaf at dusk

The hard part of hunting squash bugs is that they generally lay their eggs underneath the leaves, and when they hatch the juvenile stages spend most of thier time their as well. It's a lengthy and painstaking process (not to mention tough on the back and neck) to lift each leaf and look underneath. As the light faded, I fired up the light on my phone, and found that I could see my targets through the leaves.

It's much less work and easier on the neck to slip your phone under each leaf.³

In principle, you could have done this with any decent flashlight, but they generally have the wrong form-factor to manuever around the plant: the shape of a phone is much better for the application.

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¹ Two of those sites were community garden plots maintained in parallel with gardens at our residences.

² The life of a repeat post-doc is not a stable one. We're good at moving and ready to stop.

³ Sorry, I don't have a photo showing any eggs or nymphs because I don't stop to document my discoveries but move to destroying them at once. It's the only way to be sure. But then, any gardener who's familiar with these things will have no problem spotting the egg arrays and the juvenile stages are pretty obvious as well.