A Perennial Lesson on Annual Vegetables

Most of our summer vegetable gardens are filled with annuals, plants that begin and complete their life cycle in one year. A seed germinates, sprouts, grows, creates flowers, which become fruit, which produce seeds, and then the plant is spent. But it has produced progeny and someone saves the seeds and sells them or puts them up in a jar or they fall to the ground. And they start again in the next spring as new sprouts. We buy seeds or seedlings or get volunteers. Tomatoes in particular seem adapt at reseeding and 'volunteering' in the garden.








Most years I have a small vegetable crop and it almost always includes tomatoes and basil. Then I have an inspiration for variety and try something new or neglected, like peppers or okra. I am almost always pleased with the tomatoes and basil and I have been perpetually disappointed, for as long as I can remember, with squash. I love to eat squash, of any color and kind. But when I plant it, the results are always the same. Sad wilting plants with strangled stalks. Squash borers. Tunneling through the once sturdy vines. One of the worst displays of vegetable destruction there is.
Of course I could use controls, mechanical or synthetic or whatever, but I have had years where I dutifully picked off insects, larvae, etc. by hand....and still they burrow. And each year that I try to grow squash I vow to never grow it again.
Due to life circumstances it's been 5 years since I had a veggie plot, but this spring I had beautiful soil and some spare time to dig out a bed and promptly planted tomatoes, basil, cilantro, marigolds.......and squash (I got starts, didn't grow from seed).
The tomatoes have been fantastic, the basil is overflowing, the marigolds are a great ground cover. And the squash looked fantastic until a week ago.
The pictures above show my successes and below, well, are my disappointments.
Caution: photo of actual squash borers, which are NOT attractive.










By the way, you can get in some fall veggies if you start now...........greens spinach beets and so on.