Help, I don't know what is wrong with my pumpkin vines!

[Mrdvong]

Help! My pumpkin vines randomly started to look like this. I do not know what is going on.

[rainbowgardener]

A whole bunch of pictures of basically the same thing, doesn't give much info. So it looks like something is chewing on the base of the stems. How is the rest of the plant doing? Does it still look healthy? Is it wilting?

Show us a couple pictures of the rest of the plant(s?)

[Mrdvong]

The plant itself is healthy just the fact that the vines look like that

[applestar]

Presumably you are in the southern hemisphere somewhere... it's hard to advise since I don't know what kind of pests are identical over there to ours.... do you get Squash Vine Borers like these? I was scrolling through my last year's thread to see if I could see similar squash plant photo.... squash vines do naturally get corky at the base as they get older.

In your last two (same?) photos, however, I might be seeing some telltale sawdust from borer gnawing. You call them pumpkin vines, but is it a C. moschata variety? IF so, the marks might be where they got chewed on but didnt manage to get inside the vines because of their solid stems. They could also be marks from other gnawing type pests -- maybe slugs or something.

Subject: Applestar's 2016 Garden

Well, Butta zucchini plants are still trying to produce --



But the volunteer squash outside the garden fence wilted overnight, so I decided to pull it. It didn't get a chance to grow a female blossom -- not even a bud, so I never found out what it was. Oh well.

I hunkered down in the hot sun and dissected the basal stems so I could take pictures and post.



After finding 5, I began to wonder what the heck I was doing -- it was nearly noon and miserably hot, ...so I called it quits, fed those to the goldfish , and bagged all the suspect parts and composted the upper good portions -- not even one diseased leaf. What a waste.

-- you can see near center of the bottom photo where I cut the vine and found evidence of burrowing further up the vine (to the right) so I cut a little further up to where the cut was clean. There were TWO SVB's in that little segment. Also notice in the left middle photo there is a leaf with brown evidence of burrowing in the leaf stem. You need to watch out for those, too.