Extension Highlights

Fatal Attraction in a Blue Hubbard

If you happened to drive past Edwin Matuszko’s winter squash fields in Hadley this summer, you might have done a doubletake when you saw that the crop borders were surrounded by a protective stripe of bushy green blue Hubbard plants.

For Matuszko, this is no fancy landscape design, and you will likely see it again later this season. Matuszko’s blue border protects his cash crop from the striped cucumber beetle, a major cucurbit predator. The approach is called “perimeter trap cropping” (PTC), and it works because insects prefer one species of plant, like blue Hubbard, over another, based on plant chemistry.

PTC works best on pests that attack fields from the outside-in. In order to kill the beetles, farmers only need to spray the blue Hubbard border. Most of the beetles die in the border, leaving the cash crop untouched and eliminating the need to spray the entire field.

“It’s been wonderful,” said Matuszko. “It’s not so much that we see a difference in the quality of our crops, but we see a huge difference in the cost of spraying.”

Matuszko is one of 17 growers in the Pioneer Valley using PTC in an ongoing study by UMass Extension Vegetable Team leader Ruth Hazzard.

Hazzard began her research in collaboration with UConn’s Jude Boucher in 2003, setting up field trials of butternut squash at the UMass Research Farm in South Deerfield. In 2006, Hazzard and her team monitored 22 fields that contained butternut squash crops surrounded by a border of sprayed blue Hubbard or buttercup squash. The team conducted visits once or twice each week to check beetle pressure on the crops.

The research, which continues under the watchful eye of graduate student Andy Cavanaugh, has been funded by the USDA’s Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program and by the Northeast IPM Program of USDA/CSREES. So far, PTC has saved Matuszko over $1,000 during the past four growing seasons and cut his insecticide use by 90 percent.

According to Hazzard’s research, a fiveacre field with six-foot spacing would cost approximately $208 to spray with standard insecticide. By using PTC and spraying only the borders, the cost of spray is approximately $11.

Besides cutting costs, Matuszko said PTC also saves him huge amounts of time during some of the busiest growing months of the year.

While Hazzard said she was always confident that trap cropping would work, it took several seasons to convince some local farmers.

“But by the third year, it was evident that the growers agreed because they continued doing it themselves,” said Hazzard.

Out of all the PTC growers surveyed by UMass Extension researchers, 100 percent said they used less pesticide and found the PTC system to be good or excellent overall. Eight out of 10 said that PTC saved them money.

Hazzard and her team continue to share their findings at agricultural conferences. While Hazzard isn’t sure exactly how many growers are practicing PTC, she knows her findings are gaining popularity among New England farmers.

“I’ll have people coming up to me at a conference…telling me how well PTC is working for them,” she said. “The more we can give this information away, the better.”

Due to a limited market for blue Hubbard that has been used as a perimeter crop, growers wanted to find more profitable alternatives. Hazzard has discovered buttercup squash, which has a high demand in New England, to be just as effective as blue Hubbard.