Trouble in squash land

For weeks, we were utterly perplexed by our squash.  Each variety was growing, there was no doubt about that; the plants were spreading out, serpent like, all over the place- beneath the kale, around the carrots, right out of the garden itself!  And along each stem we saw dozens of squash blossoms.  Yet, we could not find a single squash.  We also began to notice that after a few days of blooming, each squash blossom was then shriveling up and DYING!!! 

Something was not right.

So we began to investigate. We donned our matching detective hats and scoured the internet for some sort of explanation. We ruled out the weather. While we've continued to be graced with ungodly heat, which, as I'm sure you remember, was the cause of death amongst our other dear friends (the beets and peas) it was not to blame for our sickly squash.  Squash apparently love the heat.  We also ruled out lack of nutrients or moisture as we've been fertilizing on a weekly basis (which by the way, is a very unpleasant experience as our fertilizer is quite pungent- and not in a nice way) and watering every day.   We also deduced that whatever the problem was, it was unique to squash as our other crops (we're down to tomatoes, kale and carrots at this point) were growing rather beautifully. 

And then...we figured it out.  We had a garden pest!!! A nefarious, foul looking creature called the squash vine borer.  dun dun DUHHHHH!!!!

The squash vine borer (Melittia cucurbitae) is a diurnal species of sesiid moth that attacks wild and cultivated varieties of squash. The moth is often mistaken for a bee or wasp because of its movements, and the bright orange hindleg scales. The females typically lay their eggs at the base of leaf stalks, and the caterpillars develop and feed inside the stalk, eventually killing the leaf. They soon migrate to the main stem, and with enough feeding damage to the stem, the entire plant may die.

But, the only way to be 100% sure that we had a squash vine borer was to cut open one of our squash stems and look for these "caterpillars" which look more like maggots.

And so we did...and this is what we saw...

GROSSSSSSS!!!!!

Yup, we definitely had squash vine borers.