The Vine is the Lifeline, the expressway for the liquid essence, the essential goodness.
Through the vine vein comes all nutrition, all understandings necessary to feed the plant so it can grow. Through the vine and the vein I bore back to two previous growing locations that were two different growing sets of conditions. In one location and set of conditions, I had no vine borers and in the other I had plenty. In one I grew large pumpkins and a variety of other squash. In the other, I could barely get one harvest before death by vine borer occurred. (I wasn't into constant surveillance and triage). Through reflection, I see significant differences in the foundation, infrastructure and fundamental approach of those two growing locations, thus I suggest the following solution, deterrent and mitigation in handling the business of the borer. 1. Continue maturing in eco-sense. This is the summary of all the points that follow. All the points that follow are bits and pieces of what has been discussed in numerous messages. Pretty much then, everything below is redundant. 2. The problem starts with our understanding of why there is a problem in the first place. Simply put, something is out of balance that balances vine borer population. 3. Allow naturally growing plants to coexist in your yard garden farm. 4. Understand that your yard, garden or farm are all the same thing. 5. Encourage birds to nest in your yard by providing what birds need, including establishing the conditions that allow birds to know your yard-garden-farm is good, safe nesting and foraging ground. Nesting birds such as robins, sparrows and songbirds will hunt for food from sun up to sun down and most certainly catch that vine borer moth in the act. We must do everything we can to earn the trust of birds by training ourselves to be the steward-caretaker-caregiver-guardians we need to be, so a more diverse community of plants and other life can flourish and be nourished in/on our yard-garden-farm. This then will allow us to also be nourished and flourish in the cycle of return.
6. Do everything you can to support healthy soil.
This includes keeping the soil covered with naturally growing plants and plant residue, including leaves. Woodchips are good, but leaves are much better for everyone involved. Consider how many natural environments are covered in wood chips and how many are covered in leaves and other plant residuals. This goes back to the birds, leaves and plant residuals, such as branches and old plants provide materials for the birds and attract more insects.
9. The problem with vine borers exists somewhere in our broken logic of how to restore balance. Most of time we are not even thinking in terms of “the problem is imbalance, not the vine borer,” squash bugs, slugs, Japanese beetles, grasshoppers, potato bugs, cutworms, not powdery mildew, not fertilizer, not squirrels, not chipmunks, not crows, not groundhogs, not deer, not mice, not snakes, not rabbits and so on.
So for instance, in dealing with deer, the problem is not the lack of a fence or deer netting, but rather the lack of sufficient deterrents, distractions, alternatives, balancers. 10. Seek to understand the pre-human truth. Somewhere in the world, there must be other plants that vine borers feed on. If not, then the vine borer would be a parasite that kills its squash hosts and never allows them to develop mature seeds and reproduce sufficiently, thus the vine borer would have been in constant decline slide to self-destruction extinction. 11. Vine borers are not the problem, but rather are a symptom that is part of a larger syndrome of symptoms caused by a fundamental disease, i.e., a fatal flaw of logic that then deforms the rest of our logic which causes our behavior to conform to an abnormal set of conditions that we call culture or way of living. This culture way of living is filled with goo gobs of problems, yet we are not aware our culture way of living is problematic. 12. Much has been said about the components of an ecosystem eco-sensible mindset reset. Try to disturb nature as little as possible and leave well enough alone. Minimize your human footprint in your yard-garden-farm. If your yard looks like your human hands did the most noticeable and most significant work, you are disturbing the ecosystem way too much, thus disturbing the balance, thus creating problems. 13. Your farm garden yard should mimic and mirror the natural environment as much as possible, thus so must your understandings of self and all else. Grow yourself and grow all else. 14. 06.21.20 Update: There are so many things nature does that we are forgetful of. An ecosystem is more beneficial than not. I was just reminded of something I had already observed years ago in another garden I was apprenticing in. Ants are definitely insects that eat other insects. We can attract them to our plants with food scraps and with food jars that have a little residue left in them such as peanut butter, syrup, honey, jelly and so on. Feed the ants and help them multiply. A youtuber reminded me that ants eat vine borer larvae. This makes sense because I've seen ants attack and eat live insects and drag dead insects into their ant nest. So I think it would be worth it to place sweet things near squash plants to keep ants coming around and that way they will likely catch and eat the vine borer larvae before it gets too far. This is still an ecosystem approach because it feeds ants using food stuck in jars that we'd otherwise throw away in a trash bag. Be certain to understand that ants eat a wide variety of food that we throw away, not just sweet things. I also observed ants carrying away fingernails and toenails. Observe where ant nests are and do not disturb.
