Froots - Pumpkins, Squash, Melons, Cucumbers

February 25, 2025

More Info

In this session, Salta Mambetova and Ben Phillips will cut into the production methods for pumpkins and squash, as well as melons and cucumbers.

Saltanat Mambetova is a Michigan State University (MSU) Extension vegetable educator covering eastern Michigan and located at the Saginaw Valley Research and Extension Center.

Ben Phillips is an MSU Extension vegetable specialist in southwest Michigan growing vegetables for research projects and giving advice to growers when desired. He likes listening to growers.

The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/

Video Transcript

My name is Ben Phillips. I'm with MSU Extension in southwest Michigan. Working with vegetables. And I'm presenting today with Salta Mambatova, who is in Eastern Michigan in the thumb area, also working in vegetables. So that's who's presenting today. And what we're going to present on are fruiting vegetables, in particular, the vine crops, pumpkins, cucumbers, squash, watermelons, and the such like that. We've got a lot of ground to cover because there are several crops in that group. And I wanted to share one of our sponsors for the meeting, AgriStrategies, LLC. They're an organization that will help to, um Yeah, and Steve's here. Steve's here, you can chat with Steve. They're a consulting group and they can help you grow in more ways than one. This whole group of vegetables is commonly called the vine crops, and they're a fruit. They come off of a part of the plant that comes from a flower, this part right here. There are lots of fruits that are also vegetables. The vine crops are one of them. We're going to talk about the kinds that are out there, how they're packaged and sold, how they're grown, and then some production limiters. So here's some botanical stuff for you. It's a family of crops called cucurbitacae, and we have different genera that we grow most commonly here in Michigan and in the Midwest. We have citrullus which is the watermelon group, Lagenaria which are the gourds. I'm not really going to be talking about gourds today. Cucumis, which is cucumbers and melons, cantaloupes and such, and then cucurbita which is all of our savory squashes and pumpkins and winter squashes. They are packaged in several ways, one being sold. Pickles often are sold in large quantities. They're smaller fruit during canning season. You can sell them in bulk that way in a fresh market scene. Melons are a really fun one for taste testing. If your market allows you to do taste tests, that's a very popular engagement tactic. If you're doing it at your own farm, that's another thing to consider. However, fly management is important if you're going to do that kind of thing because these are sweet sweet crops. And so careful with that. Then with the hard squashes, there's really nothing small about producing hard squashes, both in the field and in putting them on display. They just take up a lot of space and a lot of the folks who do vine crops are people who have space. When I interact with market gardeners, the JM Fortier style of production, high intensity, a lot of tarping and stuff like that, vine crops aren't usually included in that mix because they take too much space and too much time and you're just sitting on it for too long and you could be putting something like lettuce in there, which takes much less time, much less space, and turnover dollars much faster. But if you have the space and you've got some seasonal market opportunities, these are excellent excellent crops. In a bulk sense, some of the bigger fruit are sold in large bins and they often go sizes are in count sizes is what I would say. For example, a watermelon or a pumpkin the size of a basketball would be something like a 30 40 count bin. You get into a beach ball size that's a 20 count bin, and they are sold in count numbers. Then pumpkins in particular, not all of these crops have this fervor behind them, but you can get people to pick pumpkins themselves instead of having you do it and package it. The whole pumpkin theme thing is a big deal in the Midwest and in the United States generally. It's a whole other racket though, that's a different ball of wax, and oftentimes pumpkins get paired with orchards for the whole fall fun festival thing. And in orchard settings is where I see particular pumpkin diseases that I don't see anywhere else, and I think it has something to do with the lack of rotation, generally. A lot of orchards get in the mindset of that the apple block is over here, the parking area is over here, and the pumpkins are over here, and that's just where all those things are going to be forever. And so the pumpkins just get in the same spot over and over and over again, just like the apples are in the same spot for decades. And pumpkins don't like that, and they start to get weird diseases over time. So in orchard settings, often what happens is pumpkins get grown somewhere else. Uh, maybe it's the same producer. They just find another field eventually, and then they start trucking them in a field and sort of like seeding them as like a u-pick experience, but it's not like they're grown in that exact location. But whatever works, What these all have in common, basically, from pickles to pumpkins, is that they are frost sensitive. They can't handle frosts at all. They're a warm season crop. They're all grown in fairly large spacings because they are vining crops. Many are grown from transplants, but not all. They all could be and they all benefit from that, but sometimes it's not practical. They are thrifty feeders, meaning they don't need as much nitrogen as a lot of other crops, which is surprising given the size they can reach. Some of them are native to North America. For example, all of the cucurbita, the pumpkins and squashes, they're native to North America and that means all the pests are too. So you can rely on them. You can rely on them every year showing up. And then the fruit needs pollination. All fruiting vegetables do, and there are some interesting fruiting scenarios here in the vine crops. As I said, you can seed them or transplant them. The ones that are most commonly seeded are pumpkins and squash and cucumbers. You can get them in as early as late May and into mid July. For pumpkins, July ten is about as late as I would take it, or otherwise, you're not going to ripen enough fruit for that whole fall season. If you transplant, you get a couple of weeks advanced production. Melons and watermelons are commonly transplanted, but they can also be seeded. Seedless watermelons, even though they start with a seed, they end up producing no seeds. They are a tough one to start by seed and more typically, field seeded watermelons would be of the standard types, so they have seeds inside. The plant populations that folks reach are up in the top corner here. This is on a per acre basis. You may have to do a conversion for square feet, but it's very low number per acre, 2,500 plants to 8,000 plants is a very low number compared to other crops because they get so big. The exception to that is pickles for processing. Most of you, if you're doing fresh market sales, aren't going to be growing pickles at that density. You can grow pickles just like every other vine crop and let them vine out if you want. But some of the varieties that are specific for mechanical harvest for pickle production in Michigan are more compact and they can really pile them in. There's a lot of ways to do it, folks. You can seed them mechanically like this with the JD 7,000. That's a popular old seeder for pumpkins in particular. You can also transplant with a water wheel. I think a water wheel is the most adaptable transplanter, because you can poke holes in plastic with it and in bare soil, and it adds fertility or water at the point of transplanting. In this picture, I think I showed a way to do it by hand. Yeah. You can use a stand planter to do stuff by hand very easily. You can poke that into bare soil or plastic. You can plant both seeds and transplants with a tool like that. And because these are wide spaced crops, it's not unheard of for people to plant a whole acre or more just by hand. Especially with seeds. It's not as hard as you might think because there's such a wide spacing. A lot of folks will use season extension for hitting an early market. This is a very common site around Bay City, Michigan. That's where some of these pictures were taken, where you get your vine crops out before frost is done, but you protect them with various sorts of plastics to get them to go faster, but also to guard against frosts and freezes. You will kill a lot of plants with this. It's a learning curve to do this right. All plastics need to be vented. And they need to be removed at the proper time so that you're not cooking plants. Then when they start to flower as well, they need, they need to allow bees to get in. But by doing something like that, you can really drastically change the growth pattern of your plant and stagger your harvests, even if you plant at the same time. By using season extension plastics, you can get several weeks advanced production with this picture here shows season extended watermelon on the bottom and not season extended watermelon on the top. I think those are melons actually cantalupes. Weed control is a huge problem in vine crops, and the folks who get started with vine crops quickly figure this out because there's a lot of space between plants, tons of it, and it takes a while for the vine crops to actually get big enough and bulky enough and bullish enough to push out and shade against those weeds that come up in all of the open spaces around them. So probably the easiest way I've seen people deal with that is with a rototiller. They'll get a rototiller. It's usually four foot, five foot, maybe they already had it. And what they'll do is they'll just seed rows based on the spacing of their rototiller and maybe add a few inches because as they go and flop over, you still want to be able to get the rototiller through there. Additionally, you could use plastics to seed into, and then that'll give you about 30 " of space where there shouldn't be many weeds, and then the row middle start and you have to manage the weeds there. You can do in bare soil as well and do some weeding by hand or with a machine like this called an eco weeder. There's a lot of ways to do it, but you do need to do it because even though that they're a really aggressive plant, the weeds are far more aggressive in those between row spaces early in the season. Colleen had a question about frost cloths. Are they as effective as plastic for season extension? Plastics work better than frost cloth, but frost cloth is also usually made of plastic. It's like a woven polyethylene. It is just much more permeable, so it doesn't hold temperature quite as well, but it does. It'll protect to a few degrees. How does moisture get to these plants with the extensive plastic cover? Well, it doesn't unless it's vented. But if you're going to be planting on plastic mulch, you've got to have drip tape or you should have drip tape. There are people who get away with it up in the thumb, the soil is so naturally blessed with high water holding capacity that many people don't irrigate at all for their vine crops in the thumb in the bay area of Michigan. But anyone with a sandy soil would drastically benefit from being able to irrigate with drip tape or overhead, but drip tape usually is a better bet. Okay, so if you want to use herbicides for weed control, this might be one of those slides you use your screenshot function on. There's a pretty tight group of herbicides that are very commonly used in vine crops. It's like the recipe. The first ones here are ones that you would use against weeds that aren't up yet, and you would time the application of these herbicides after you've seeded the pumpkins or the vine crops or whatever you've got cucumbers or whatever, you seed them. This is only for direct seeding, mind you, you'd seed them, but before they come up, you apply these herbicides and then it stops weeds from germinating. So what you really got to do is work the soil first so that there's no weeds, plant into it with seeds, still no weeds, spray soon after while there's still no weeds. And these products will help further prevent weeds from germinating, but will allow the vine crops to come up. So the timing on that is really important, and it's easy to mess up and it's often rain dependent as well. So they work well and sometimes they don't work, and sometimes they even stunt the crop. If it's a really slow, cool, wet spring, it's too wet, it's too cool, your crops will be impacted by that too. If you're transplanting, then you have to use a shielded sprayer, something that blocks where your plants are so that they don't get hit by these herbicides and you can use them between plastic to help prevent weeds from growing between the plastic. Now, if weeds come through and you want to use herbicides, there are a few products you can use carefully because when weeds are emerged, oftentimes your crop is emerged too, and herbicides can hurt your crop significantly. So the first one I'll start with is probably the safest for escaped grasses that are up and growing, you can use post or select max. Those are grass herbicides. You can spray right over top of the pumpkins or cucumbers. And because they're not grasses, they're not drastically affected. Sandea is a product you can spray over top of all the vine crops, but your vine crops will hate you for it, but they will grow out of it. It's often recommended that you shield your crop if using it. Then the final two, round up Gramaxone, Scythe and AXXE, those will straight up kill your crop if you let it touch them. You can use them between rows. You have to be very careful about directing the spray to the weed and not the crop using shields or wands or something like that. For fertilizers, these crops enjoy a pH that is very slightly acidic. They're fairly light feeders for nitrogen, so you can start the season with 40 pounds of nitrogen and then maybe add 40 more about three or four weeks later. You can also drip feed them about a pound a week. For phosphorus and potassium, it's all soil test based. I won't tell you what you should use there. I think you should use a soil test to judge what you should do with phosphorus and potassium. But with those nutrients, you can add them all in the beginning of the season if you want, with a part of the nitrogen, and then for the whole rest of the season, all you got to worry about is nitrogen. I would not add all your nitrogen in the beginning because most of it will leach away from you and your plants won't get it. Only give it a little bit in the beginning and then more later. You can sometimes get nutritional issues. Fruiting vegetables in particular get stressed out when the fruit starts setting and magnesium deficiency can show up. This is really common in tomatoes. You can see it in vine crops as well. You get yellow between the veins, and it can get bad sometimes. It can get really bad to the point where all that tissue between the veins starts to die, and then it can get infested by secondary pathogens and it can look pretty scary, but often it's just a nutrient deficiency. We can also get environmental problems from ozone that can get kind of wild looking, and sulfur injury is also a problem B road pollution. And in times where we've got certain atmospheric conditions, we can get sulfur injury. With plants with huge leaves, diseases look really bad and they can really grab your attention and they can be somewhat hard to diagnose. I recommend that when you find issues, you should try to get diagnosed through the MSU Diagnostics lab or if you're here from out of state, your state may have a diagnostics lab where you can send samples. It's really clutch to get a proper identification to manage a pathogen in particular. With fruiting vegetables, you also have fruit, of course. You have to take the plant the whole extra mile to get it flowering, pollinated, and to make a fruit. The fruit have its own conditions that they enjoy and don't enjoy. They can crack, they can split, they can have holes in them, they can get burned in the sun, they can abort. There's a lot of factors that play into that. Oftentimes, it's a weather thing, sometimes it's a nutrient thing. Blossom end rot is fairly common and that's usually an irrigation problem, too much water or too little water or infrequent enough, you can get blossom end rot. Zucchini and summer squash seem to get it the worst. In terms of cracking, I don't see this happen much in any other crop but the cantaloupes. I don't see it much in pumpkins, barely in watermelons, but the melons is really susceptible to it. It's where you get a nice fruit, it's pretty much ready to go, its skin is pretty set, but then you get a rain and they just suck up just that one little bit extra amount of water and they pop open. Once you've got fruit open like that and it's a sweet fruit like that, that brings in the crows and the raccoons and the deer. Then you've got a whole other slew of things going on. I talked about abortions a little bit. Sometimes you can get uneven pollination that results in crooked fruit because you get pollination at one point that starts to fertilize the seeds and they start to grow, but the rest doesn't get pollinated and you end up with a lumpy fruit or a curvy fruit. Colleen asks, How do you know if you've got blossom end rot from no pollination? Blossom end rot will always result in a rot. Pollination usually doesn't. The whole fruit just turns yellow and falls off. Dan wants to know about calcium and boron on the last slide. All I meant to say by that is that fruiting vegetables are driven by calcium and boron. If you're lacking calcium or boron, then you can end up with problems. But most of our soils are completely adequate in calcium and boron is really not much of a problem unless you know your soils are deficient. Ask for that in your soil test. You got pollinators. They only like to fly in certain weather depending on the pollinator. Bees or honeybees are super prissy about the weather. They don't like rain. If you've got a rainy day and it's pollination season, you're going to miss fruit set. If it's also hot and droughty, they're going to convert their effort to look for water instead of pollinating. Again, you won't get fruit set. Bumblebees are a much more dependable pollinator for vine crops for all of them, and then squash bees are a great one too, but they tend to focus only on squash and pumpkin. They don't really do pickles or cucumbers or melons. Then longhorn bee is also a really solid performer, and it's cool looking too. So we got pollination that has to happen that takes pollen from the male flower to the female flower. The plants can't do it by themselves. So many other fruit and vegetables can do it by themselves because they have the male and the female parts in the same flower and it just takes a little bit of wiggling around and they pollinate themselves. But the vine crops can't do that. They have these big chunky pieces of pollen, as you can see stuck to the squash bee here. It has to be physically moved. So it's really important that you have bees that are in the environment to help work for you. With seedless watermelon, you might think perhaps they set fruit without pollination because we do have varieties of cucumbers like that where you don't need bees, you don't need pollination, they set fruit and there's no seeds in them. But with seedless watermelon, it's a different thing. It's set up differently genetically and they do need bees, but you need standard watermelons grown with them. So here's a little diagram. Triploid in this case, means seedless, and diploid means a standard seeded variety. So you need to grow about a three to one to a four to one ratio of seedless watermelon to standard watermelon, because the seedless need to get pollen. They need to get pollen, but once the pollen has been received, it'll trigger them to start to set fruit, but they won't make seeds. So you still need bees, in this case, to make a seedless watermelon. Catherine asks if you can do the pollination and pollinators are not completing the process. You can. If you have a few plants, you can. But beyond that, it's really not going to be great. Most of the reasons why pollinators would not be pollinating are very transient environmental effects. Just wait a day. Every day new flowers are opening, so you might miss a day, but the next day they'll be working again. I wouldn't stress it. One other thing about fruit quality is that most of these crops are easy to tell when they're ripe. Watermelon is the exception. They are really hard. They're going to teach you when they're ready and it's going to take some practice. There are a lot of ways you can learn it and some are better than others. The way I like best is looking at these tendrils that come off of the nodes of the vines. If they are still flexible, then they're not ready. But once they're dry and crispy and you can snap them off, then it's likely the watermelon is ready. Check more of them up and down the vine to make sure you've got several that are like that, and then also roll the fruit over and if it's got a nice yellow belly, then it's ready. Okay. Salta, I'm going to turn it over to you to start talking about some diseases. All right. Thanks, Ben, and good morning everyone. I guess I'm going to talk about some diseases. What I picked is, I'm going to talk about common disease among all cubcurbit families, but there could be some anyway, I'll show you in different slides, I guess. But before I go, what diseases usually caused by microorganisms. Those are your fungi, bacteria, Oomycete, the water molds and viruses. I don't I have a virus picture, but if you have any questions, we can talk about that later. How do we get disease in our plants? Basically, I like to show this disease triangle. What we have here in one side, we have a host and usually you have a susceptible host, and then you have an environment and a pathogen. Oops. Three things they need for disease to occur, and the amount of disease would depend on these three factors. If you have, let's say, you know, a really susceptible host and you have a virulent pathogen in the right conditions, then disease amount could be big. And then how it spread also it depends on the environment. And I don't have a lot of um I guess, information on it, but a lot of the pathogens, they have spores basically and spores are the ones that the reproductive part of the pathogen and that they spread from plant to plant by wind, by air, and by a human too. I guess next slide. I have picked five or six common diseases. This is a fungal disease, Gummy stem blight or we also have we know as a black rot. This is two kind of a disease but caused by the same fungal pathogen. Gummy Stem blight usually occurs only on leaves and stems, and as you can see here down at the bottom, some of the pictures showing the necrotic or death leaves on it, and then also on the stem. And then the black rot part is on the fruits usually on the fruits. So, um and the pathogen. Usually, I mean, if you can, when you're choosing, you know, what varieties to plant, look for resistant or tolerant varieties. That's number one to go, I guess. Then it likes moisture conditions. And if you can use drip irrigation, not to spread those spores again with overhead sprinkles that helps. The pathogen survives in crop debris. So when you are done with, you know, with your crop, make sure you get rid of all your um crop debris and you don't want to pile up in the place where you're going to grow next year. And that's where it comes rotation to. If if you do see, you know, a big disease issue with Gummy Stem blight or black rot, maybe you have to rotate out and come back, you know, in another year. So again, as I said, it likes really low moisture, high humidity that makes really susceptible plant. Then once a plant gets susceptible and gets infected, then secondary infection happens with other pathogens as well. Like what Ben mentioned was the nutrition deficiency if they get stressed out, then the secondary as a secondary infection, some pathogens can come in. Similarly with insects, I know Ben is going to cover insect part, but if insects movements there and then you damage the plants, then it may allow pathogen comes in too. The next one. Next one is powdery mildew. There's two mildews. There's a powdery mildew, is also a fungus, and then there's a downy mildew, which I'll talk about in a little bit, which is a water mold. Those are two different diseases and sometimes people tend to confuse them. But powdery mildew, you would see them on the leaves easily. They will show these white powder on the leaf and powdery mildew usually occurs in sometimes mid July, I think in Michigan, maybe a little earlier, but around that time, I think last year, we did see a little bit earlier, but usually that's when it shows up in your field, and then from then on, you you may see them like later, you know, in August and and so forth. I First, you can also see some yellowing symptoms, Cirrhosis and yellowing symptoms on the crops that scouting helps when you go into it and then if you look for specific, I guess symptoms like this the white powders that might help to identify what you have. Powdery mildew, I don't know a lot. I know pumpkins have tolerant resistant varieties. Ben if you can jump in and let me know if the other um Cucubit families have squash. In the squash world, there are resistant varieties. Cucumbers aren't very affected by it. Watermelons aren't very affected by it. Pumpkins. Pumpkins is where you see a lot of the resistant traits. Spaghetti squash is notorious for being the first thing to get it. If you've got spaghetti squash, that's where you look to see it starting. Okay. Thank you. So again, usually it will infect the foliage or the leaves. But in what it does also it predisposed to other pathogens. It makes the crop weak, and it will also, I think predisposed to quick ripening, which is not even if the pumpkin is not ready, it will push to that. If you do use fungicides, we recommend to rotate the FRAC code, the active ingredients of your fungicides. I have a slide later on and I can show you what this frac code means. In the table, but it's using different active ingredients of the fungicides and rotate them so you won't building a resistance. Next slide. Next, another fungus or fungi, it's verilum wild. I know Verticillium Wilt has a very wide host range. I know in melons and other strawberries and other peppers and tomatoes, you can have them in This is, in my opinion, it's a bad one because it does survive in the soil and can live in the soil for some time, some years. I believe it's like five, seven or could be even longer, and that's the sad part because we don't want any disease or any pathogens living in your soil. Um The recommendations would be disease free seed if you can buy. Again, there are some resistant or tolerant varieties for certain crops. So when you're choosing when you're looking at the catalog, you have to maybe screen and see what varieties, what options are there. Again, it's a soil borne lives in the soil. Sanitation is a big part of it. If you do find and as you can see here, what it does is basically what, the pathogen does it blocks the xylem and does not wilts the plant right away. It basically blocks any nutrients or water to go through the xylem and come up to the plant. So it starts wilting and starts dying and basically dies. As you can see, I don't know if you how well you can see in the picture, but this was a watermelon fill from last year. I was visiting a farm and noticed this picture. Again, it has very very close range. You have to see if once you get it for the rotation, you have to make sure you don't plan something that can be a host for a verticillium wilt. So you have to pay attention for that one. Next one. And bacterial wilt, I only have one bacteria slide, I guess. There are other bacterial diseases that bacterial speck and others. This one is I put only one kind of recommendation to manage cucumber beetle, both striped and spotted because those are the ones that actually will transmit this disease and it's overwintering for them too. They can be infected overwinter and next year come to your farm and the best thing is to manage. Again, the symptoms, as you can see from the name also, it's a welt. It will wilt the plant. And if it's very destructive, you can see that it will die and turn black. If there is a lot of beetle movements, and if you do get similar symptoms, then it's probably bacterial wilt. One thing, also quick diagnostic sometimes could help to look at your stem, cut stem open and here in the picture shown and then try to pull apart and it kind of, ooze comes out from the plant because the bacteria produce this ooze and that's one of a quick diagnostic tool, I guess. But again, depends on the triangle that I talked about, the condition. Sometimes if it's too dry, you may not see it very well. But the beetles are the ones that brings this disease to the farm and and move them around. Managing them it's the best option is the best control. Next one. Now I'm switching to Oomycete, the water molds. I think I have two or three of water molds. They're like fungi like, but they're not true fungi. Downy mildew is the one that I guess, one of the common ones. Downy mildew is there's two types of it. One type cause a disease on cucurbits and melons, and then the other one caused on other squash and watermelon and so forth. So there's two types and we have seen last year only one type that cause usually, I think, again, Ben, you can correct me. Usually we see the one that cause disease on cucumbers and melons so far at least. And that's kind of a it's a big problem for big growers, I think, and I There are, again, tolerant varieties out there. It does not overwinter in Michigan, so it does come from south part of the state and through air. It flows through air. There's once it, with any disease, once you get disease in your farm, I mean, there's no curing part, so you have to kind of just um you know, eliminating the disease part, you know, getting rid of, especially if it's a smaller area where you can control, just pull them out, remove them from the field, and do not leave them there. If you do see any, you know, disease symptoms, that's like general suggestions, of course. And if you do use fungicides, then fungicides usually helps before you see the symptoms. You know, you have sprayed them before or if there's a very little symptoms appear when you're scouting and you see it, then you use it. Otherwise, um, it just, you know, spreads out from, again, the the spores that do go, you know, and infect other plants. Different pathogen spores can move from, you know, by wind, by water, you know, irrigation, rain, splashes, and especially bacteria, it splashes and then they move from one plant to another and from field to field. In the next slide, I've taken this recommendation and the little fact sheet here, and I will be posting at the end some resources links and you'll get them then. But I have taken this from Dr. Hausbeck's research lab. She's a pathologist at MSU, and she puts out for certain pathogens or disease that her lab works, certain recommendations in fact sheets. So Downy mildew is one of them. She does a lot of work with this pathogen and there's a recommendation, I think yearly she updates it, and this is the 2025 one that she put out. So as I said, the FRAC code, I'm going to mention that here. So the product name is the first line, as you can see, different just the name of the product. And then you have the AI, which stands for active ingredient, is the actual chemistry that you use. And then the FRAC code basically gets each chemical gets a specific ink coat. So that's what when I say, you know, rotate your FRAC coat, I mean this because there could be, you know, where is example, if there's an example, 22, like element is 22. But then if you go down, there's zinc, It's also 22 and oh five. I mean, there's a couple, you can see, there's 22 03 and 22 05. Rotating means you have to FRAC a different FRAC even though the product name is different and then one of the active ingredients is different, but another active ingredient is the same. Sometimes you have to pay attention. The product name could be the same or could be different, but then active ingredient and FRAC codes could be the same. So you don't just read the product code, but you have to pay attention for the active ingredient and FRAC code. This table talks more about also how many applications per season you can do and if you do see symptoms what you spray and then before symptoms what you spray. Again, it's two or three pages fact sheets that at the end of the presentation, I'll share some resources and you'll have that too. Next one, Ben. Another water mold is phytophthora. It's again, one of those like the earlier one, the fungi, the soil borne verticillium has wide host range. So it has wide host range, but there are different phytophthora that cause this different on different crops like phytopthora, tomato, and phytophtora and cucurbit is two different phytophthora. But they are, again, water mold, basically, they all water. Usually, you see phytophthora in your field if you have poor water drainage after heavy rains and yeah, if there's a lot of water, usually fight lots that favors the conditions. Again, it It's soil borne for the cucurbit part of the phytophthora not for tomatoes and potatoes, but for our top for our curcubit families, they do overwinter, and they can come back next year. If you do get all seeds, then you have to rotate because you don't want to have that come back next year. Same thing with fungicides. If you do use fungicides, you have to rotate a FRAC code so you don't build the resistance. But as you can see, it's a the very destructive one. Again, these are the pictures. The two pictures top are mine and then the bottom one I borrowed. But it's once it you can see in even fruits once it hits, it's hits pretty badly. It's I mean, you can't use this one. And again, you cannot leave the crop debris in the field. Make sure you remove them, make sure you, you know, remove them from the field because again, so the spores would overwinter. You don't want them to overwinter in your soil, so you have to get rid of them. And then I think I have one more maybe disease part. Oh, this is again, similar facts that was produced by Dr. Hausbeck's lab. Again, I'll show you the share the resources, but its a very similar fact sheet as to the downy mildew one. Just for cucumbers, I guess, but she has more. The last one, I believe, it's a root rots and damping off disease. This one I wanted to put because this is a complex disease caused by several pathogens. It could be a seedling stage disease or it could be a fruit stage disease. It depends on, I guess, different time of the year. So if you do have and when I say and I didn't list specific names because there are several of them. There are Yes. There are several of them. They are Pythium, Rhizoctonia , same phytophthora and So there's several pathogens that cause this disease. And on the seedlings, you can see here a seedling photo. It just basically root rot. It just rots the root. And if you have, you know, when you start your seedlings, if you do see some, you know, stunting or seedling dust, you can always pull the plant and see the roots or check the roots and then see what's going on under the root. That's how you can, I guess, first quick diagnostic to And during the season, if you do get them, which is not very common disease. It's during the season on fruits, unless you have them heavily, if you have heavily infected in the soil, then you might see them, but you will see again these white spores on the fruit and they're different from the phytophthora one that I just showed you because these ones are kind of fluffy and a very soft, fluffy spores versus phytophthora more kind of smooth and not fluffy at all. Again, these are leaves in the soil, so they overwinter. A lot of them also love water like phytophthora and Pythium. Those are water molds, so the good drainage system helps. So if you, if you don't have much water on your farm, standing water, that helps. Um Well, I think that's all. In general, I think for the disease, sometimes it's hard to figure out what it is. As Ben suggested, if you don't know what is going on, sending a sample or calling to your extension educator, if you are a commercial vegetable, we can come and help to diagnose or and work with yours or help you submit samples. Is it my last line? Yes. You had a couple of questions come in that maybe you could address before we move on. One was, both of these came out of your downy mildew discussion. Can you trim off the affected area or does the whole plant need to be removed? That's number one. Number two, could you make some recommendations on organic approaches to managing downy mildew? Okay. For the trimming off, I would say just to remove the whole plant because we don't know how much spore has been and usually you see it on your lease, but once you have it probably. Again, I would even remove the ones that are maybe very close by to make sure they're not infected. And for organic options, yeah. Someone put neem oil, I think that neem oil could work and there's not a lot. I think, some name oil, some other oils may help with downy mildew, but I don't know how much a lot of there's not a lot of satisfaction to be had with organic fungicides against something like downy mildew. It's a very fast acting disease that kills. It doesn't just nickel and dime the plant. It just takes it out. But so you got to think about other things, not just how to spray your way out of it. For pickles in particular, my recommendation, and again, not a very satisfying one, but it's the world we live in with the disease the way it is. My recommendation is to grow pickles and cucumbers so that you can get your main harvest before mid July and then don't grow them again. Because the pressure is really high later. I know that's not great for a fresh market scene, but if you're here and you're a gardener and you just want enough cucumbers to pickle something for yourself, plant as early as you can and be done by mid July and just don't worry about growing cucumbers for the rest of the season. The rest of the commercial growers have to battle it. But for your own personal use, just don't grow cucumbers beyond mid July. David, I'm going to save that question for the end and see if we can get it fit in there. I want to move on to the bugs. Salta, do you want to mentally take note of the question David put in the chat? Sure. Cool. We'll get to that near the end. I'm going to talk about bugs to take us to the end and I'm going to go through a calendar scene here. Most of the insects in this crop complex are native to North America because the crops are native to North America. Melons, pickles, and cucumbers are not and watermelons, but all of our native pests just hop right on them too pretty much. In the beginning of the season, we've got seed corn maggot, which is a fly. It lays its eggs near the base of the plant, and then they burrow into the seed or the very young plant sometimes before it even comes out of the ground and it eats it. We've also got cucumber beetles which overwinter and are just ready to go for the very first seedlings of cucurbit crops and they skeletonize the leaves down to nothing and that's how they die. Later on, these crops can take a huge amount of cucumber beetle feeding and they're fine. But at this stage, they're not. They can't really handle this pressure. Moving on to July and August, we get into, again, cucumber beetles are going to be the whole season long. They'll start moving into the flowers. You'll see they love the flowers. We got squash vine borer, which is a caterpillar that wilts the crop. It lays its eggs down at the base of the plant. They burrow in as caterpillars and they make a channel. It's already hollow, but they feed from the inside out and they make the plant wilt. That's another thing that wilts cucurbits or added to the list. Cucurbits wilt in spectacular fashion, and a lot of things can cause it. This is one of them. They are a very short window of time when they work. They only have one life cycle. They show up, they come out of the ground as these really pretty moths. They lay their eggs and then they're done. But their larvae live for many weeks and so the wilting actually occurs later far after the moths are done. Uh, but yeah, that's one, then you can almost time it. You can get weather data to time when the moths are flying and then you can take action on your plants. We've also got squash bugs. These things are tanks, they lay eggs that are really robust, really pretty. They're in tight patterns usually on the undersides of the leaves. They all hatch at once and they look like fast aphids or spiders a little bit. Then they start to grow and you can see them in all life stages on the plant. The full adults down here are really smart, they really don't like to be seen and they're watching you when you go into the field and you'll see them scurry to the undersides of plants and stuff. And then slugs are a problem around this time of year. Slugs aren't usually a problem on the plants themselves, but on the fruit, and when it's really wet and you're in a wet scene, the slugs will feed on the fruit rind. And as the fruit ripen, you might not see it at this stage, but then later as the fruit ripen, you might start to see these weird puckering spots and scars on the fruit. And that is just slug feeding that is healed. But really the problem is when the fruit was green. Moving on into closer to ripening time, September and October, cucumber beetles still a problem. They will start to feed on the rind of fruit and they'll start to scar it. Squash bugs really ramp up as well, and they'll get really prominent on just a few plants, usually. Squash bugs are kind of funny. I think it's because of the way they lay their eggs in these tight little bundles. If you get enough squash bugs who lay their eggs on one plant and then they all hatch, and they don't really travel very far when they're babies because they can't fly. So they just hammer one plant or a few plants, and you get these almost like sacrificial lamb plants that look horrible. They've got a lot of squash bugs on them, and then it's just like a pylon. Thankfully, with something like that, you have these insects concentrated on one plant. It makes it a lot easier to do really small treatment spray with a backpack. You can hit a few plants that are totally covered and take out most of the squash bugs. Then aphids are another problem, particularly later in the season where at some points they can cause viruses and that's a thing. But for pumpkins and a lot of the fresh fruit, if you get aphids as the fruit are getting ripe, what they'll do is they'll drop a honeydew on the plants, which is a sticky excretion, and then mold grows on that, and then there's skin casings fall on it too, and you just end up with really gross looking fruit, which are fine if you can wash it, but that's like this whole extra step and process to marketing the fruit. And it tends to be worse later in the season. What can you do about it? Well, there's some non spray options, including seed treatments, which aren't really a spray, but they're still an insecticide. A lot of seeds come pre treated, especially when you get into pumpkins and stuff. They're pretty colors. It's often a fungicide, maybe three fungicides and one insecticide all mixed together into a powder covers the seed. It offers about four weeks of protection. So the plants can get past that delicate seedling stage and the cucumber beetles don't hurt them. You can also use nets, and this is a great picture of a farm that's done a great job with their net situation. It's really tight to the ground and not only did they use nets, they're using these sticky cards in here too to try to attract cucumber beetles that are emerging under the nets. The cucumber beetles get stuck to the cards. With slugs, you can use baits. Slugs are not a perennial problem. I mean, in certain years in certain fields, you might have a problem and that's it. There are both organic and non organic slug baits that you would just distribute and that usually takes care of them. Then with sprays, there's a bunch of options. I'll go through a few here. Again, we have groups, like Salta said, there's the FRAC codes, and in the insect world, we have codes as well, and I've listed them here. I listed one, two, three, four, four different groups of insecticides that you could choose. The first group are the oldest Group one. These are insecticides that will kill almost anything they touch. And they work on cucorn beetles, squash bugs, and aphids. That's what those little abbreviations mean. The second group is not as old of a chemistry group, and you can only use them if you have a restricted use pesticide certification. They're not for everybody. But you can use those on all the pests I've talked about except for the slugs. The next group are the four A's. These are the Neonicotinoids. They're unique among this whole group of pesticides in that they're systemic. You can put them in the drip tape, you can spray them, they can be on the seed treatments, and the plant absorbs them, and then when the bugs eat the plant, they get the fatal dose and they die. The bees can also be affected by this in the pollen and in the nectar. Be careful with the use of those. We usually recommend that if you have a seed treatment already, that you then avoid using Neonicotinoids later as a spray because the level of neonics circulating within the plant is more than what is safe for bees at that point. But they work really well. The next group, the proles, they're the newest sort of insecticide category. And they work well on cucumber beetles, aphids, and seed corn maggot. If you can use it during an in-furrow treatment at seeding, they work well on seed corn maggot, especially, which one? I think it's this one, cyclaniliprole. I think it's labeled for it, particularly. Exirel or Verimark would be the trade name for that. Then some organic options are neme, which is kind of like Azadirachtin Azadirachtin also comes from the Neem tree. I believe it's a hotter formulation than straight neem oil, and then pyrethrins as well. It's an organic product coming from a Chrysanthemum flowers, extremely expensive and not very effective on cucumber beetles. But one other one you could use is called spinosad or entrust. I didn't put it on this list, but that's another good one. I'm going to try to handle these questions near the end and try to just get through the rest of this presentation. Spraying, we have big plants, we have big spacings. Does that mean you need a big sprayer? Does that mean you need a big sprayer? Maybe not, but I think if this is your future, then you should probably invest in coverage of plants if spraying is going to be one of your approaches to management. Wand sprayers leave a lot to be desired. Have you ever had a coloring book where there's a lot of, there's a lot of sky and you want to try to color the whole sky. I have kids, so this is a thing. You have a sky and you have one blue crayon and you try to color the whole sky and not leave any white. That's like spraying with a wand sprayer. It's super annoying to try to get good coverage. In a situation like this bottom picture where the foliage is all closed in, you want good coverage. If you have individual plants that you can see the borders of, then a wand sprayer is a little easier to use. But once these plants all crash together, a wand sprayer is really not the tool. Its really not. It gets really hard. So then, are you going to have to crush fruit to spray if you get a boom sprayer and you're driving over plants that are all vined together? Yes, you're going to crush fruit. It's something that's going to have to happen unless you have really big drive lanes, and you still might crush some. But with technology these days. Maybe not. You could always contract a high crop sprayer. This is common. I've seen it. You can get these big crop sprayers from some of the larger companies to come and do some sprays for you. You often will have to sacrifice your choice of product because it might have to be something they sell and it's going to cost more because it's a lot of road time and it's a big tank, and if you have a tiny field, it's an opportunity cost for them to come and treat your little field. So that brings to light a whole other thing now, drones. These are particularly well suited for hitting small fields in a short amount of time with very small volumes of a product. Maybe a product you own, but the sprayer doesn't. So they can come to you. You've got the jug, they've got the tool, they spray it on, they're in and out. It's just a. It's just a truck and a trailer. It's a really cool new opportunity for some of the small market growers who want to use a spray. Okay, wildlife. We've got wildlife, okay? We got birds, we got rodents, that eat seeds, that eat plants. We've got deer that munch on plants through July and August. They do like vine crops. Sometimes they're a little prickly for them, but they'll eat them. Then deer, again, around ripening time. They can become a problem along with rodents, raccoons, and crows. Once they get keyed onto a field, it can be a little free for all. The crows usually kick it off the crows and the deer because they can puncture holes in things, and then raccoons come after that. Then human pathogens, Most of these crops grow very close to the ground. Some of them are eaten raw like cucumbers, and so that's a recipe for pathogen concern. So if you haven't gotten your Food Safety Modernization Act training, you should do that for commercial sale, that is. If you're just doing it on your own, don't worry about it, just for your own use. There's a training coming up March 10th, and I can put something in the chat or, I can try to put something in the chat for that. All right. And then Salta is going to put in these different links here for resources for the Midwest Veg guide for a lot of different pesticide options and also non pesticide options for these tools for some of these crops. And we've got Mary Hausbeck's downy mildew website down here on the bottom right. And if you want to sign up for our summer newsletter so you can be up to date on all the latest things happening in veg all summer long, that you can login down there on the bottom left. Salta, I'm going to go back to the question on diseases that we got. Do you remember it? I'm trying to find it. Yeah. It's the angora spot and then plectosporium blight. Angular leaf spot is the bacterial disease. Usually, it's come with infected seeds or seedlings into your farm. I mean, similarly, as I said, all of the disease to protect or prevent, it's a I mean, basically, again, the water, the irrigation part. So it's using drip irrigation will help versus like overhead sprinkler because that would move around the spores. And then was bacterium, or bacterial, I think you can spread when you are scouting or in the field, so make sure the sanitation or changing your pose if you're in the field or in the greenhouse, that would help. The Plectosporium blight, I know it's also a soil borne fungus that lives in the soil. I call that orchardist disease. I almost always see it on farms that have orchards because they stick the pumpkins in the same place for too long. People who have a really good rotation, I tend not to see it as much, but I think it's on the rise. So the person who asked the question may have some perspective there if it's something they're seeing despite great rotation or if it's from cucurbits that might be in the same place too long. I've seen it in places without a great rotation. Yeah, because it does live in the soil, so it will come back every year. We do not rotate. So. Yeah. I think that's, I mean, there are more diseases that I did not cover that are not maybe as common, but you may see it at your farm. But these are the ones that I picked were to that I saw them last year, I guess, during the growing season. For the gentleman who asked about plectosporium, the groups of fungicides that tend to work okay on it are the strobilurin Group 11 and the azoles, group three. Those are things like Azoxystrobin, pyroclastribin, or, Diphenylisoxazole , those kinds of things. Okay. He said that was not orchard. Our first pumpkin year, is it winter over? Yes, it will it will overwinter in the soil, the spores. Yeah, an angular leaf spot is tough because it's a bacterial disease that jumps to the fruit and rots the fruit. That's one you should stay on top of with copper or sulfur. Let's see here. Do sprays like peppermint help hide crops from squash bugs? No, I don't think so. They are so well evolved to key into cucurbit crops that they're going to find it. Garlic is about the only botanical repellent that I have seen some efficacy data on. It wasn't with squash bugs though, it was with other pests, but I don't think peppermint is really going to be the golden ointment there. Okay. Do neonics on treated seed last only about four weeks also? Yes. The neonics untreated seed lasts about four weeks. That's correct. Yeah. How do pumpkins respond to different micronutrients? Pumpkins in particular, they're not super sensitive to certain micronutrients. I can say that for sure. I overapplied boron last year and my peppers looked horrendous. But the pumpkins didn't. The pumpkins seem to handle an excess of boron just fine. In relation to sulfur, they can get a folier issue if you're applying it over the foliage, especially if it's hot and sunny, they can not like that. With calcium, there's almost always enough in the soil. It doesn't really need a lot of extra. I wouldn't really tweak the microbes that much. Boron might be the only one I'd consider adding, but again, it's only if there's a soil test that would support it. Okay. Well, I really do appreciate that you chose to spend some time with us this morning. Thank you, Salta, for presenting on the diseases, and I hope to see some of you tomorrow and later this week. Yeah. Thanks everyone for joining. Thanks, Ben, for leading the presentation.

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