Pest Issues with Vines
Like all plants, vines can fall victim to pest issues. Many insects love to burrow deep in their thick foliage, making them difficult to spot and deal with. However, letting an infestation get out of hand can spell serious problems for your plants, so it’s worth learning how to identify these insects to keep their populations under control.
Mealybugs
Soft-bodied, light-colored, and almost fuzzy-looking, mealybugs love to latch onto vine stems. There, they stick their beaks into leaves and suck out their sap, causing the leaves to dry out, turn yellow, and fall off. Keep them under control by pruning off infected plant sections or dabbing the insects with a Q-tip dipped in rubbing alcohol or insecticide.
Aphids
These brown, black, green, or yellow insects are a common garden scourge. Like mealybugs, they latch onto new growth and suck out the sap until that part of the plant dies. You can control them with insecticidal soaps and by pruning off infected plant sections. Or, use biological control methods by introducing predators like ladybugs to keep the populations in check.
White Flies
These tiny white insects are closely related to aphids and mealybugs. Like their relatives, they love to attack the backs of vine leaves, causing them to turn yellow and fall off. Carefully inspect leaves for signs of eggs and remove any that you see.
Spraying vines down with water or insecticidal soap can prevent whiteflies from making them home. Many gardeners also have luck trapping the pests with yellow sticky tape. The flies are attracted to the color and get stuck to the tape as soon as they touch it.
Cucumber Beetles
While most common on cucumber vines, these bright-colored beetles will make many annuals their home. Not only do their feeding habits damage blossoms, but they can spread mosaic virus and bacterial wilt through the garden.
It’s best to cover vulnerable plants with floating row cover as soon as they sprout to act as a barrier to keep the bugs away. If they’re already established, pesticide might be the best solution.
Squash Vine Borer
It’s the larval stage of this moth you’ll want to avoid around your vines. It tends to bore into plant stems at the soil line, causing them to wilt and die. Address the issue immediately, and your plants may make a full recovery. This will involve cutting out the pest as soon as you see signs of boring and covering the wound up with soil.
You can also use a syringe to inject a biological pesticide like Bt (sold under brands like Dipel and Thuricide) directly into the wound.
Cutworm
As soil dwellers, these caterpillars come out at night and chew through plant stems, causing them to look like toppled-down trees in the morning. You can protect vulnerable vines by wrapping stems with strips of newspaper about an inch above and below the soil line. Keep it in place until the plants get established, as cutworms only go for seedlings.