If Pests Destroyed Your Squash Last Summer, Plant This One Weird Vegetable to Lure Them Away and Protect Your Harvest

If you’ve ever planted squash in summer, you likely know a thing or two about cucumber beetles and squash vine borers. These are not vicious pests, just hungry bugs looking to chow down on your crops – and squash tops their desirable food list.

Almost every gardener who has ever tried growing squash has had to combat these pests – and, unfortunately, many of us have resorted to pesticides. But there’s a better way to protect your tender young squashes. It’s called trap cropping.

If this sounds tricky, it’s only tricky in the best sense of the word. This organic pest control method tricks pests into eating the trap crop planted around your squash, leaving your garden crops alone and untouched! There’s one type of vegetable in particular that common squash pests can’t resist. I’ll share what it is and how to use it to protect the precious gourds in your garden.

Know Your Enemy

What exactly do cucumber beetles and squash vine borers do in your garden? They can destroy your entire squash harvest. But let’s take a closer look at how, so you understand how to defend against them.

Squash vine borers might be the most problematic pest of summer squash. Their parents are moths who lay eggs in the soil near squash plants. The borers emerge from cocoons to eat right through the stem of your squash, killing plants in the process. Since this happens underground, it’s easy to miss this problem until it is too late.

Despite their name, cucumber beetles also love zucchini and other types of squash. They are not squirmy, nor do they live underground like squash vine borers. In fact, they look a lot like ladybugs, except they are yellow with black markings. These pests eat the leaves, flowers, and fruits of your squash plants and they can also transmit bacterial wilt.

What Is Trap Cropping?

When I think of a perimeter intended to protect my plants, fencing is the first thing that comes to mind. When I was sowing acorns on my land in France in order to start a forest, I installed fencing all the way around the land to keep the wild ponies from chowing down my seedlings.

But a protective perimeter doesn’t have to be made of chicken wire and stakes to be effective. In a vegetable garden, the pests are smaller than Basque ponies and can crawl through or fly over almost any physical barrier. That’s why trap crops work so well.

A trap crop doesn’t block the passage of pests. Rather, it attracts the pests so much that they never need to go past it and into your garden.

Meet Your New Ally: Blue Hubbard Squash

There is one vegetable that is practically irresistible to squash pests: the Blue Hubbard squash. It is a delicious, edible squash that doubles as the perfect trap crop. You can get Blue Hubbard squash seeds on Amazon.

It’s a large, heirloom winter squash with tough, bumpy skin that’s a weird shade of blue. And when I say large, I mean large! Blue Hubbards can grow up to 40 pounds (18.1 kg), offering plenty of sweet orange flesh for cooking.

But the main benefit of Blue Hubbard squash is that it’s wildly attractive to pests that eat other types of squash. Spotted and striped cucumber beetles as well as squash vine borers would rather eat Blue Hubbard than most other squashes any day of the week. That means that you can organically control pests using Blue Hubbard squash as a trap crop.

Benefits of a Blue Hubbard Trap Crop

Using Blue Hubbard squash for pest control is a win-win for your garden. It has been proven to lower pest infestations on summer squash by up to 95% for cucumber beetles and 88% for squash vine borers. And it does so without killing any beneficial insects, like pollinators.

This system also decreases the need for chemicals in the garden, focusing on an environmentally friendly practice that supports biodiversity instead. Over time, you will see better yields for your squash at a low cost.

The cherry on the top? Blue Hubbard squash plants grow so fast that they help keep weeds out of your garden, too. That means less toxins and less effort to combat weeds. Plus, they make delicious pies and breads!

How to Use Blue Hubbard as a Trap Crop

There are several ways you can use Blue Hubbard squash in your garden to protect your other squash plants as well as other cucurbits like cucumbers, pumpkins, and melons.

The first is to plant a literal perimeter of Blue Hubbard around your garden bed. Plant sufficient Blue Hubbard crops to completely encircle the main crop you wish to protect. This keeps your squash free of pests and also free of pesticides.

But you don’t have to do a complete perimeter to get the benefits of Blue Hubbard. You can use just 6 to 8 Blue Hubbard squash plants at the corners of your garden, placing them about 3 feet (1 m) from the center crop. This will protect a small garden of cucurbit plants.

Kill the Pests

Now that you’ve lured all the unwanted pests to your Blue Hubbard trap crop, it’s time to capture and kill them. If you don’t kill the cucumber beetles and squash vine borers on the trap plants, they will continue to reproduce on those plants. Subsequent generations may move over to the squash garden with the plants you wanted to protect.

It’s best to kill pests using a non-toxic method, like sucking them up with a reverse leaf blower, hand-picking them from plants and squishing them, or by spraying them with an organic pesticide like neem oil, which you can get on Amazon.