Pickleworms?

I've got bad news for you. (How queasy are you?)

Zen is partly correct; pickleworms are the culprit but that mess isn't eggs. That's the frass of pickworms....poop. The slimy aspect is goopy bacterial slime, unique to pickleworms.

We ordinarily think of caterpillar frass as being dark dryish pellets. That's what comes out when they eat foliage! Pickleworms are feeding on the white, wet insides of cucumbers and other squash. What goes in is what comes out.

Cut open that cuke and you'll see the caterpillars, if they are still inside.

Thanks for the replies,

Ugh! We were thinking slug eggs. How do I organically get rid of them?

Any fruit that appears to be affected needs to be removed and disposed of. Caterpillars may pupate among stems and stalks of any garden plant, so good housekeeping is important.

Pickleworms are very challenging. The eggs are very very small and difficult to spot; the caterpillars are inside the fruit; you can't cover your plants with netting because cucurbits require bee activity.

Even if you were willing to use pesticides, you would be putting the bees at risk. Plus.....there's the problem about the caterpillar being INSIDE the fruit.

I don't know what to suggest to you. There's probably some useful information found on .edu websites.

@rhizo - Hey! I wasn't going to tell her that! Haven't you ever heard of softening the blow?

LOL!

Actually you CAN use floating row covers - but its too late now.

The way that you do it is you keep them covered 24/7 until they start to bloom. Then you uncover them only during the day when bees are active. You recover them before it gets dark - before twilight even. The adult moth is nocturnal.

There is a predator that eats pickleworms, but you're not going to like it ...

FIRE ANTS

I'm guessing you'd rather stick with the pickleworms. But I could be wrong about that.

Neem and spinosad are suggested organic pesticides, but given how the caterpillar feeds, I'm not sure how much good Neem would do. Neem, at least, can interrupt the lifecycle, which could help you next year but perhaps not this year.

Obviously any cucumber fruit that is already infested is just a dead loss. You would need something that would kill off the caterpillar before it crawls into the fruit, when it's still bonking around on the stems and eating blossoms.

However Spinosad WILL kill anything that hasn't shrugged itself into a fruit jacket already. Just be sure not to spray it directly ON a bee - it is a contact poison to bees, but sadly not to may pests. Pests seem to have to actually eat it. Spray weekly.

Remove and dispose of anything that is obviously infested - NOT into your compost. I'd run the infested cukes down the garbage disposal rather than send them to a landfill to continue breeding. And I guess burning something as wet as a cuke is sort of out of the question.

I guess running the vines at season's end down the garbage disposal would be a bit much - but maybe you could burn them in a charcoal grill? Burial at sea? Just don't put them in your compost or leave them in the garden.

In addition to the other good advice you've gotten, pickleworm is one of the main reasons most FL gardeners switch out traditional North American style crops for more tropical things in the early summer. Usually pickleworm starts to show up around the end of May in southern FL, and it attacks most cucurbits.

It's really only just time to be starting cucurbits again in your part of the world, if you want to avoid having to deal with pickleworm, and with the warm winters we've had the past couple of years, even winter planting may not faze them.

Trying to grow cucumbers in the summer down here is just begging for trouble.

Here is a link that might be useful: U of F planting guide for FL

Meant to add that I've just recently started seeds for the fall and I've already seen a pickleworm moth checking them out, even though they don't even have the first true leaves yet.

Here is a link that might be useful: lots of info about pickleworm

Thanks so much for the replies and info. I discarded the affected cukes and leaves when I found them. they went into my trusted bucket of soap water.
We had already sprayed with Neem, Yesterday and the day before, so maybe that helped.
After careful examination this morning, it looks like we might have lost another cuke, but There was no goo yet, and it was only one.
@Zensojourner, no need to soften the blow. I needed to know what course of action to take.
@conchitafl We try to follow that type of schedule, just put the cukes down in September. Harvested 2 cukes before this happened. My Northern friends joke that this is springtime in Florida, time to plant.

I'm pretty sure that knowing the white goo is actually worm poop was not vital to your course of action, LOL! (but I was just joking anyway)

Maybe a tropical cuke would fare better? Seeds of India has some. They don't much look like what we think of as cukes - they're sort of yellowish instead of green.