I heart irony

OK ladies, this is funny. As you both know, we are working on our first garden. Our cucumber plants have been going CRAZY and taking over nearly half of the space. About a week ago, we noticed that one of the plants was starting to turn yellow and wilt. Now the problem seems to be spreading.

I did a little research and we think it is Bacterial Wilt caused by the Cucumber Beetle. We were hoping to do this as organically as possible (i.e. we don't want to use pesticides) so I looked up alternative ways to handle the problem. This is what I found....

David H. Wise and co-workers in the department of entomology at the University of Kentucky thoroughly investigated spider predation of cucumber beetles (Snyder and Wise, 2000, Williams et al., 2001 and Williams and Wise, 2003). Wise found that both striped and spotted cucumber beetles reduce their feeding rate and emigrate from cucurbit plants in the presence of the large wolf spiders Hogna helluo and Rabidosa rabida.

Are you kidding me??? See Kate, there is a silver lining to every cloud! At least you know you can have disease-free cucumber plants on your property. I would say to ship a couple of those bad boys on down here to help our cause, but I suppose some yellow sticky tape applied to the inside of a plastic cup will just have to do the trick.