Newbie gardener - wilting cucumber and yellow squash

[NE Fl Square Ft Gardener]

Hi All,
I just registered on this site and this is my first post. I'm in Zone 8. I have a 4ft x 4ft square foot garden with about 10 inches of peat moss/vermiculite/compost mix over dirt. I have a cucumber vine and a yellow squash bush next to each other on the bed that I planted as seedlings on May 11. They were doing great until this morning. This morning the new cucumber leaves is wilted and the yellow squash leaves on top turned ashy. I also noticed that the baby squash that was growing started to rot. I have no idea what to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

 

[Chuck]

Hi All,
I just registered on this site and this is my first post. I'm in Zone 8. I have a 4ft x 4ft square foot garden with about 10 inches of peat moss/vermiculite/compost mix over dirt. I have a cucumber vine and a yellow squash bush next to each other on the bed that I planted as seedlings on May 11. They were doing great until this morning. This morning the new cucumber leaves is wilted and the yellow squash leaves on top turned ashy. I also noticed that the baby squash that was growing started to rot. I have no idea what to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

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Vermiculite and peat moss have very little if any nutrional value. Peat makes the Ph lower which may or may not be a good thing. But, what they both do is retain water. The "soil" is staying too wet which is why the squash has the beginning of powdery mildew and the baby squash is rotting either because of lack of pollination or being too wet, probably both. Since peat has no nutritional values and compost by itself not enough, what are you fertilizing with?
Is that a baby cucumber in the picture or a part of a leaf? If it is a baby cuc it has not been pollinated sufficiently which means it will grow up to be fat, short and with a pointed end.

Spray both sides of the leaves with Neem Oil

 

[NE Fl Square Ft Gardener]

Thank you very much for your response. I'm not fertilizing. The peat/verm is the formula for square foot gardening that I followed. For the compost portion of the formula, I used a mixture of kitchen scraps compost, black kow, worm castings, and mushroom compost.

It has been raining every single day for most of the day here for the past week. I'm not sure how I can dry up the soil. What organic fertilizer do you recommend for the squash and cucumber? I also have zuchinni, black krim tomatoes, and icebox watermelon on the same soil mix.