I worried about having too many zucchini this year, but that worry was unfounded. About 10 days ago, I noticed some leaves on the zucchini plant were yellow and wilting; the zucchini on the plant was wilting and dying. I saw a few bugs, so a nice Mom’s Plans’ Facebook reader suggested spraying the bugs with a mix of dish soap and water. I returned to do that, but I didn’t see bugs any more and I didn’t see any eggs under the leaves. I did see a lot of black ants, but I don’t know if they can kill vegetables.
I was sick with a stomach bug and couldn’t go to the garden for 5 days. Hubby assured me everything was fine, but when I finally made it to the garden, it was too late. The zucchini have stems that are eaten out, little white dots on the base of the plant and big white spots that look like mold on the leaves. There is no new zucchini growing. The cucumber, which was growing in between the zucchini, are wilted and dying. All the cucumbers on the vine have shriveled up and died, and the vines have all shriveled.
Can anyone tell me what happened? What does this sound like?
We have decided to just pull up the plants since they took up the majority of our square foot garden. Instead, we will try to plant another tomato plant and a few more green pepper plants. Our tomato and pepper plants that are already there are growing great.
In the last 13 days since my last report, we were able to harvest the following:
Zucchini: 3
Green Peppers: 0
Red Peppers: 7
Hot Peppers: 1
Cucumbers: 15
Tomatoes: 15
For the entire season, we have gotten the following produce from our garden:
Zucchini: 8
Green Pepper: 0
Red Pepper: 9
Hot Peppers: 4
Cucumbers: 16
Tomatoes: 15
If you are gardening, how is your garden doing?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I think what you have on your plants is powdery mildew. It’s a type of fungus that can kill your plants. You can prevent it by buying resistant varieties and watering from below the plant leaves (such as a soaker hose). Watering in early morning is also better than watering in the evening.
That sounds about write. The really damage seemed to happen after our big storm with 80 mile per hour winds. I always watered at the bottom, but today my husband pulled up all of the zucchini plants and said they were mushy at the bottom.
look up squash bugs. that may be the culprit, too.
Squash bugs are likely. We had them attack ours, and we discovered it after the eggs had hatched. (There were tiny spider-like bugs in clusters under the leaves where the eggs should have been.) We scraped all the bugs off by hand, sprayed the entire plants with the dish soap solution and applied powdered Diatomaceous earth (nontoxic) and we saved all but one of our 12 plants that had started to wilt and turn yellow. This was NOT an easy process. We were out there for hours at my husband’s insistance, manually scraping leaves, soaking things in dish soap solution and killing and and all of the bugs we found. Such a pain, but we had fried zucchini fries last night
I think it was worth it. (Seriously, look into the D.E. Earth. You want an organic, food grade variety for your garden.)
Sounds like a lot of work! What do you do with all of the zucchini? We ate a lot of ours and froze some before we had to rip out the plants.