Master Gardeners learn about a lot of different insects, spiders and all sorts of creepy crawlies during their training.

It’s fairly easy to remember the good guys: lady beetles, lacewings, dragonflies, bees. It’s harder to remember all the details about the bad guys until we encounter a particular pest ourselves.

Early last week, I noticed some of my squash vines wilting. With the high temperatures we were having, I was wilting, too. I gave the squash some extra water, but as the heat continued, it didn’t seem to help.

Then I noticed the bugs. There were weird bugs crawling all over one butternut squash. As soon as I leaned down to get a better look at them, they’d scurry to the underside of the squash.

I mentioned to another Master Gardener that these bugs looked like a cross between a short-legged spider and a box elder bug. She asked me if the plant was wilting.

Uh, yes.

She told me to look up squash bugs on the Internet. The photos in the linked article could have been taken in my squash patch!

My first thought was to run out and get some Sevin. Sevin is a pesticide that kills a number of garden pests, but also kills the good guys if you’re not careful.

Then I came to my organic senses. The squash patch isn’t that big and there’s no reason I couldn’t eliminate the pests by hand. I keep telling myself I need the exercise!

First, I cut off the one butternut squash where they were congregating. Then I started inspecting the tops and bottoms of each leaf for eggs. If a leaf had eggs, I cut it off. Then I cleaned up the dead leaves.

All the cuttings went into a plastic bag and were thrown in the trash instead of the compost pile.

I repeated this a few days later and found a few more leaves with eggs. The problem seems to be fixed. The remaining leaves look fine so far. The vine has produced eat least a dozen spaghetti squash, so it’s done a good job. If I find any more squash bugs, I’ll remove the vine.

Not remembering a common pest like the squash bug has not been my most embarrassing garden moment this week.

In a patch separate from the rest of my garden, I planted one watermelon and one pumpkin. One of the watermelons looked ripe and sounded ripe, so I cut it from the vine. My mouth watered all the way to the kitchen. I cut it open and …

It’s not a watermelon.

In fact, I have no idea whether it’s a squash or a melon. I can’t tell by the seeds or the taste. I looked through my seed packets and didn’t find a clue.

Must be one of those seeds I got at the Idaho Botanical Garden seed exchange!

If you have particular questions about gardening you’d like to see addressed in this column, send them to highprairielandscapedesign@yahoo.com.