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market-farming - [Market-farming] Flea Beetles, Striped Cucumber Beetles and Squash Bugs, Oh My!

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  • From: "Alliums" <garlicgrower AT green-logic.com>
  • To: "'Market Farming'" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] Flea Beetles, Striped Cucumber Beetles and Squash Bugs, Oh My!
  • Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:09:04 -0500



Hi, Folks!

So glad to be home for this snowstorm instead of snowbound in State College,
PA last weekend for the PASA conference.

Anyway, I did manage to get to a Penn State entomologist's talk on cucurbit
pests. He did a study and found that flea beetles, striped cucumber beetles
and squash bugs have worse infestations in organic/sustainable systems than
conventional systems.

He doesn't think it's the spraying in the conventional systems - he really
thinks there is something going on in the practices/soil of the
organic/sustainable folks that is promoting these insects, but he hasn't
been able to get funding. He is going to try to put together a PASA field
day so that growers and his students can talk about what's going on and try
to study it closer to try to find a solution.

So far, using spun row cover (agribon) seems to be the only solution for
squash bugs, but he doesn't like it because it excludes squash bees, which
he thinks are the perfect cucurbit pollinator. So he'd like to see
something else and find out WHY squash bugs are such a horrible problem in
organic/sustainable farms.

There was also a lot of talk about a woven cover called ProtekNet which
seems to help with flea beetles, but the squash bugs just stuck their
oviducts in the mesh to lay the eggs on the squash plants and infested the
plants anyway!

Anyway, as long as we're going to get depressed about the snow, I figured we
should get depressed about the bugs, too! ;-)

Dorene in Southeastern PA with BLIZZARD CONDITIONS coming this afternoon!





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