Above: the first ripe roma tomato of the season. Unfortunately, it was afflicted with Blossom End Rot and so it ripened too quickly and wasn’t very good-tasting. This hot weather with no rain is likely what has caused the BER – we need to water more frequently to keep the soil evenly moist.
In other bad news, we had to pull up all of the buttercup squash plants today. They had worms boring up the stems from the roots – all of them. Very, very sad and upsetting. I hope the cucumbers don’t get attacked, and I am concerned about the rest of the vine plants. We definitely need to have our soil tested next year – something just isn’t right. It takes a few years, though, for land that’s never been gardened on to become really fertile.
This is way, way past when this information would be useful, but maybe some day in the future it will be useful.
My parents had one year when their squash (all of it: pumpkins, butternut, acorn) got some weird ailment where the stems started rotting. I don’t think they had mites, but every day there would be a new part that was rotten, cutting parts of the plants off from their roots. My mom just vigilantly buried the new ends in mulch and they quickly grew new roots and continued to grow. Sure, they ended up with mulch piles and squash all over their yard, but their harvest was the same size that year as any other.
As far as I know, this hasn’t happened to them since.
Vine borers. I posted about them later on in the season.
Pretty typical, actually – especially if you live within a couple of miles of anyone who has grown squash in the past few years.
We did “surgery” on the rest of the squash last year – slice open the stem, remove the worm, and bury it. That’s really the only way to get rid of them without pesticides. BT, maybe.