My 2 Tricks to Stop Squash Bugs in Your Vegetable Garden – Easy & Effective

Timestamps. This is how I greatly manage down the population and damage of squash bugs in my garden.

0:00 Squash Bug Treatment Overview
0:32 The Squash Bug Laying Eggs – Insect ID
0:52 Egg ID & Leaf Inspection
1:54 (Real Time) The Hose Spray Trick & Squash Bug Hunt
5:19 Squash Bugs & Insect Dusts
5:53 Each Female Lays 250 Eggs & Time Frame
7:03 The Tape Trick & Egg Removal
7:52 The Soap & Oil Egg Kill Method
9:22 Inspection Routine & Conclusion

Thanks so much for your support! Cheers & Thanks, Gary!

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[Music] Welcome to The Rusted Garden Homestead this video is all about squash bugs two things you can do to really control them unfortunately there’s not a dust or a spray organic not organic that you can really put down and kill them off so you have to do a couple of things first thing is always check the leaves starting now around June 15th here in Maryland the squash bugs come to the garden and sometimes on top of the leaves you’re going to see squash bug eggs that’s how I know that they’re here and you can remove the you can you know pinch them out you can put tape on there peel it off you can cut off the leaves so while inspecting the leaves I’ve never seen this before in years here’s a squash bug actually under here laying eggs right now and that’s exactly what they do so I want to get rid of that guy get rid of the eggs but you want to get rid of the eggs right away and you want to start inspecting the leaves every couple of days if you come over over here on the underside of the leaf this is more characteristic there’s lots of eggs right on there and I’m probably just going to cut this Leaf off and again you could dab it with like hydrogen peroxide mineral oil anything to just really get rid of them now that’s pretty standard you look for the eggs you remove them you reduce the number of eggs that are going to hatch and you know you can manage your squash a little bit better the other thing I like to do is get right into the stem and then I watch and then I water I spray the water water the plant squash bugs the adults tend to hide under there especially In the Heat of the day they hang out they come out when it’s cooler towards the evening Etc lay the eggs when we start spraying down there they’re they’re not going to like the water they’re going to crawl up onto the leaves the stems and then you got to grab them use a glove use your hand squash them get rid of them we’ll do this in real time and let’s just see what comes up to the top here just soak it down really really well and you might have missed it but this one came up right up the side here that’s a squash bug and I just crushed it and the whole idea is to do this when you water over a week or two period of time and you just really want to soak the base in get the water everywhere disturb where they may be resting I see one moving right back here now and that just came from hitting the area with water that’s what a squash Bud looks like I’m going to squash that off camera and that’s two that I’ve gotten so far each squash bug remember can lay 250 eggs and they usually start here mid June they go into August and then after about the middle of August they’re gone but they do most of their egg laying in really June and July here’s a zucchini that got a little bit larger than I want let me remove that and then get in there soak the area down and there goes one right up there and you get to grab it want to take a look at what they look like let’s get that in focus and take that off camera squash that that’s the general idea sometimes you’re going to find 2 3 4 sometimes you won’t find anything but just keep at this for a week or two and you greatly reduce the population especially between June and July when the eggs are being laid it does take some patience and you can see one moving right up here got it who almost fell a man look at that massive zucchini in there but let’s take this guy give him a squash so that’s four and I didn’t even see that zucchini there I almost fell into the plant trying to spray grab and shoot the video we’ll give it one more rinse there’s one moving out across the Earth actually these are two that we’re mating so we’ll get rid of that one get rid of that one down there and you’re looking for them to be crawling along the stem down at the base anywhere up here across the dirt the water is just going to get them moving so you’re just looking for motion so again the whole key is motion and there’s one moving right here and we’ll get rid of that one and you just want to keep looking around but just you know in this last 20 minutes that’s going to be a great reduction in the number of eggs that get laid on my squash and zucchini plants here is the squash bug and one of the things that you might see there is there is some dust the dust really isn’t effective at kill them it’s supposed to it says that it does that’s why I like removing the eggs and removing them by hand if we give this a little touch he’s going to move and I’m going to go ahead and grab it and kill it so I’ve tried spinosad I’ve tried Seven Dust I find that they don’t really get killed off by the different insect dust so removing by hand squashing them getting rid of the eggs really really works so remember each female can lay 250 eggs so you can remove these put some tape on there it’ll peel the eggs off of there just get rid of the leaf use a Q-tip put on mineral oil any kind of oil neem oil Vaseline just cover the eggs you know if we see one group there’s there’s a bunch more there’s a group right there let’s get these back in Focus there’s a group there another group another group just get these covered with some sort of oil that will kill them off and if you’re in doubt just remove the leaf there’s plenty of leaves growing down here and just stay up on it in that 2 we period you can really get rid of a lot of the squash bugs that are that are going to cause future problems here’s more even right up here I mean the eggs are everywhere so once you see some eggs you know that the adults are down here doing your thing use the water as a way to find the squash bugs and remove them one way to remove the eggs is to use painters tape I find that works the best just find the eggs which are right here and you take the painters tape or any tape really and you really just pressing the tape down really tightly on them painters tape peels off easily so the squash bug eggs should stick to that but and you can see the they’re coming off let’s see right there and you would just kind of keep dabbing it until they’re all gone and eventually you get them all onto the tape anything left on the leaf you can rub off with your finger you’re kind of smashing them if they fall to the ground they’re usually eaten by something but you can remove them using the tape if you want to keep the leaf intact again it’s fine to go ahead and remove um the leaf if you want to the other way I’d like to control them and this is probably the and easiest this is Dawn dishwashing soap some peppermint oil you can use any oil I find peppermint oil works really really well and this is good to destroy the eggs I sell rosemary oil peppermint oil NE oil at my seed in garden shop and this can sit in here you know forever really until it dries up and goes away so I just bring this out with me you don’t need a ton of it so just get most of it off of the Q-tip and then when you’re out here looking for the eggs you know you can see them let me make sure you know what I’m just going to break this Leaf off but pretend the leaf is staying on there and you can see the eggs all right in there and I just take the soap and peppermint oil and cover it up now that is going to kill the leaf right there but it’s also going to kill the eggs off and then you’re really good to go and the leaf the whole Leaf isn’t going to die you’re just going to see a burn patch like right there but this is probably the easiest way to do it if you want you can rub them a little bit some of the eggs will come off but once they’re coated with the rosemary oil peppermint oil neem oil whichever one you want to use they’re going to die off the soap does a trick on them the oil does a trick on them so they’re not going to survive and that’s the whole idea is to reduce this population down it’s really worth taking the time to inspect the leaves in here I have three clusters one 2 3 so you can find a lot of them they’re going to be most active here in Maryland June 15th to I don’t know about June 30th they begin to slow down over time but you really want to catch them early by killing them off you reduce the number that survive over the winter so you’re get have fewer coming back next year they’re going to reduce the amount of eggs they lay as you get to like August 15th or so so here in Maryland I know these are active June 15th to August uh August 15th or so the other thing is is these might get beat up they might die off but if I plan another round say July 15th I could be planting through the squash bug cycle it’ll be easier to manage those plants and then I’m going to have perfectly good squash all the way really into late September here in Maryland I can see another cluster right over here so they are just everywhere so now is the time to go and see if you have them some of you will be lucky you don’t have squash bugs in your area I hope you never get them thanks so much for watching please check out my seed shop at the rustag garden.com and really the best way that I found to deal with the squash bugs is to actually get down and squash them and the eggs can be on the top of the leaves can be on the bottom of the leaves but you want to hunt them down and get rid of them thanks for watching