Can't Win

There are no winners in the battle of the squash bugs. They have the numbers. I have the size. There are simply too many to annihilate. I’ve certainly put a dent in them through my regular checking under the leaves and removing eggs and newly hatched babies. The fact that there are babies at all show I’m not finding all the eggs though and if I fail to locate a bunch of unmoving eggs, my odds of locating all of the moving bugs once they’ve hatched are not good. The plants aren’t exactly easy to peer under and that would be without my ever increasing discomfort in bending. So life goes on with my “Squish ‘Em as You Find ‘Em” strategy seemingly sufficient to keep the plants alive, but not enough to ever actually end the war. It’s a fight of optimism though. While knowing it’s unlikely, I cling to the hope that maybe I can eradicate them. More importantly, I retain the belief that the plants are worth fighting for at all. For all my efforts I’ve harvested exactly one zucchini. I pulled it off a week ago and I haven’t even eaten it yet.

All this is in contrast to my so far trouble-free eggplant plants. I cut off two eggplants last night, one a bit larger that was turning more of a lavender rather than the deep purple of the smaller one. The seeds were larger in the bigger one, but I didn’t notice a difference in taste. Of course both were fried and covered in marinara sauce and cheese in an eggplant casserole, so the other flavors pretty well overwhelmed the eggplant. Good texture though. I was pleased.

I also managed to get a couple servings of green beans off the plants on Friday before they really took a turn for the worse over the weekend. I’m not really sure what got to them and I haven’t done any research to try to figure it out yet. The leaves all got sort of spotty and turned yellow and many have dropped off. It seemed to move progressively down the line of plants. They grow fast enough I could pull out what’s there and stick in some new ones, but I really ought to try to figure out what the problem is first.