Leaf-Footed Squash Bug

The leaf-footed squash bug became a problem in my garden this past spring.  With not much of a winter and an early spring, the insects were out early.  Cool-season gardening is usually my favorite - I plant potatoes as well as lettuce, spinach, broccoli and peas.  With the early warm weather, came the squash bugs.  I have to say that I saw lots of these pests this year, but I didn't see much damage.  The most dramatic scene was a declining potato plant with many squash bugs in different stages of development.  The orange/red nymphs had me fooled at first - I thought they were assassin bugs.

From the order Hemiptera, which means half-winged, these insects have a partially hardened forewing, while the rest of it is membranous.  Leaf-footed means that part of their hind legs are flattened, possibly resembling a leaf.  They have sucking mouthparts - a proboscis pierces the plant tissue and sucks out the liquids.  While some bugs transmit pathogens, it is unclear whether this one does, although any damage to plant tissue can be an opportunity for diseases to infect the host plant.  They also can be a lot larger than other garden pests, measuring a inch or more, including the antennae.

In the spring, eggs are laid typically on the underside of a leaf of a member of the Curcubit family - squash, cucumber, pumpkin, etc.  In about ten days the eggs hatch and the nymphs begin feeding on the host plant and in about 4-6 weeks they will have grown into adults, having completed simple metamorphosis.  The adults don't mate, but overwinter until spring when they emerge, mate and begin the whole life cycle again.

The best control for this pest is vigilance.  Check regularly for egg clusters, hand pick individual bugs from plants, remove dead host plants and cultivate the soil, hopefully disturbing their winter resting places.

Spring is here (and so are the pests!)

Spring has probably been my favorite gardening season - everything I plant does fairly well.  Sometimes I plant broccoli, lettuce, spinach or onions, but I always plant potatoes.  One of the reasons I like spring is that it's a little too early for the bugs to be a problem.  This year is different - to begin with, we never really had a winter.  There were two or three times where we had freezing weather for a few days, but that was it.

I hate to write more about the early heat, but...the mosquitoes have been out in force for a month now.  We are approaching the "last expected frost date" for our climate zone - this is usually when we get one last cold snap - but we have had at least one day this week that the temperature was 90 degrees.  The only positive weather this spring has been the extra rain - that is nice.

OK, back to pests.  I have a bad habit of ignoring plants after they start growing good.  Part of it is that I believe they are doing fine, but the other part is that I don't multitask very well.  Once I move on to another project, I really do forget about the other thing - in this case, the vegetable garden.  Last week before I put in some hours at the master gardener office, I was watering my potatoes when I noticed one plant didn't look quite right - see if you can tell which one.

Now that I'm a Clemson Master Gardener (intern), I knew I couldn't just let it go without figuring out what the problem was.  It didn't take too long to find the culprit - I've seen these insects a lot in the last couple of years, but with the early spring, they had a chance to attack my potatoes now.  I'm talking about the leaf-footed squash bug.  It is one of the piercing insects, meaning that it pierces the leaves or shoots to feed, leaving that part of the plant in a compromised state, as you should be able to see from the photo.  Unfortunately, they are hard to manage, especially this time of year.  They have just emerged from spending winter underground (presumably), and are going to start mating.  After they have mated and laid eggs is the best time to control their population - they tend to lay them in clusters on the underside of a squash leaf.  After about ten days they will hatch into nymphs and at that time you can use an insecticide on them.

There's not a lot you can do about them when they're adults.  I tried hand picking them the other day, but it was pointless.  I decided to unleash my secret weapons on them - chickens - and hope there wasn't much collateral damage in the process.  I know I fenced the garden off from them, but maybe it would be better if they had free reign of the vegetable patch - yeah, I'm not sure about that.  I didn't see any problems when I came home after letting them into the garden, but I couldn't tell if they had eaten any bugs either.  I'll let them have at it a few more times and we'll see.

Postscript - apparently, I wrote about this topic before for the master gardener class and posted it here.

Squash Bugs?

I think I have squash bugs, although they weren't on my squash. Now that I know what they are, I'm going to have to check my squash in the morning. Actually, I was trying to take some photos of my blooming yucca for an upcoming post when I noticed these bugs all over the flower stalk. It even looked like they might be mating - they were backed up against each other. Sorry for the slightly blurry photo - I wanted to get the closest photo I could. They seemed familiar, but I really didn't know where to start to figure out what they were. I had to narrow it down a little since there are a large number of bugs and insects out there. After consulting the "Basic Entomology" chapter of my MG training manual, I narrowed it down to bugs or beetles. Then I searched Google images for "beetle", "beetle pests" , and then "garden pests". Found on the first page of results was something that looked pretty similar to what I had - it was a squash bug.

I'm quoting from the manual: "Squash bugs overwinter in protected places as unmated adults. They appear rather slowly in the spring. They mate and begin laying egg clusters about the same time the vines begin to grow and spread. Eggs are yellowish brown to brick red in color and are laid in clusters of a dozen or more on the leaves. They hatch in about 10 days into nymphs that become adults in four to six weeks. Only one generation of bugs develops each year. New adults do not mate until the following spring."

So how does one control them? Advice on the subject varies, from not planting squash, to killing them as you see them. I may leave the ones on the yucca alone, but I'll make sure to check my squash and related plants for eggs on the leaves. If you have any, good luck with getting rid of them.