Garden Pests and Diseases: Friend or Foe #6, 0 by Night_Bloom

Night_Bloom wrote:
A continuation of our thread where we discuss insects and related critters in the garden and whether or not they are helpful or harmful.

Here is a link to the previous thread... http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/536309/ . The first post of that thread contains links to the previous threads or how to get to them.

I decided this time I might start off with a Foe instead of a Friend, mostly because I'm too lazy tonight to look for the friend picture I had in mind, but eventually I will find it (we were talking about crickets and such, so I intend to post a few pictures of various crickets, katydids, etc. eventually). But tonight I was in a moth mood, so here we go...

This rather pretty moth is not a good guy. This is likely known to many veggie gardeners not by this form, but by the holes it can leave in cucumbers and squash - though nowhere near as bad for squash as the squash vine borer that I think someone posted a good picture of here in the past.

This is a Pickleworm moth. Fortunately for me, the cucumbers I grow are chinese cucmbers which these seem to do only very minimal damage to, and only later in the year. These don't bother my squash much until later in the year either, by which point the vine borers have usually done them in anyway.

As with the squash vine borer, tilling is one way to help reduce these guys. Dig up the soil in areas where you've grown susceptible stuff and the pupae get exposed. Birds and weather do the rest.

Here we go - a Pickleworm moth...