Apparently, these are squash bugs! Thanks, Andrea! We have the spray and will be dousing the vine, bushes, and part of the garden tonite. Seriously, the bug factor (are slugs officially bugs, too? If not, broaden it to a pest factor) is the biggest turnoff for me when it comes to gardening. They just flat out gross me out. They don't scare me, but they are just plain gross. And it feels like they're crawling all over me once I've seen a few. Ewww....
What is this bug??? There are hundreds of them all over an aggressive vine coming from my neighbor's yard. The vine overtakes everything on my side of the fence every year, but this year it's worse because it has these black things all over it! Now, granted, it looks like they're killing the plant, but in the process, I don't want them to kill the plants underneath them, the ones that are mine!!! And they're VERY close to my garden, and I did not do all that work to have a bug colony eat the fruit of my labor. Literally! HELP!!
I probably did a very stupid thing (Did I mention my thumb is only very slightly a pale pale green and that this is the first year my garden is still alive at this point in the spring/summer?) and tried to hose them all off. I had two thoughts: (1) they might get mad and fly away, or (2) they might be so wussy that the force of the water kills them instantly. Apparently, I was wrong on both accounts, because they're all still there. So now what? Do I spray them with something? Of course we want to rip out as much of the vine as we can, too, but the roots are on the other side of the fence (and it's a rental so who knows who lives there right now?) and I really don't relish the idea of ripping out all those vines with the bugs still all over them. Ewww. And they're just barely hanging over one side of the garden (which is how I found them, when I was trimming back a few bush branches), so they'll all fall off into the garden as soon as we start ripping them out.
Help!
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