The great squash depression

After a very joyful and happy weekend off for us farmers at Stone Soup Farm (I was on a weekend retreat with college friends, Jarrett was away at a southern wedding, and Emily and Dave were out and about doing fun things in the Valley), we were ready to start our work week bright and early on Monday.
That is, until Emily declared at our morning meeting - "I have bad news. Do you want it now or in the field?"
Jarrett wanted it immediately, of course, and we all held our breath for it.
"The winter squash are gone."
Where'd they go, you ask? Well, they went under Reemay Row Cover after we transplanted them into the field, as you can see in the first picture of this post. It was a preventative measure to protect them from the atrocious cucumber beetles that had mangled our other cucurbit crops with a vengeance.
But when we lifted the row cover early Monday morning, they were nowhere to be found. You could see the few droopy remains of a butternut squash here and there, but besides that - nothing. When we examined the soil closer, we could see skinny strands of something white-ish where the plants used to be. I had no idea what they were. It seemed as if someone had removed each plant from the soil and replaced it with this stringy thing.
The unfortunate events that led to this devastation are quite simple. The days after we put down the row cover were way hotter than we expected, and the little squashes couldn't handle it. Burnt. Charred. All that was left was a scraggly remain of what was once the stem. I wasn't aware that they were so sensitive to heat, but now I have seen the proof.
It was a hard decision - to protect them from the beetles or to bet against the weather. In the end, it was the wrong decision. Those plants that were left out from the row cover were still standing, and it seems as if the cucumber beetles hadn't even found this area of our fields at all.

Jarrett took this scene in quietly, and instructed us to pull up all of the row cover to better assess the damage - a death toll of about 80%. We're not sure what we'll do from here; maybe salvage the remaining living plants and consolidate them in a different part of the field, perhaps scrap the whole thing and start again from seed. Regardless, we will have a winter squash harvest this year. It may be smaller than we had hoped, and it may come later than we wish, but it will come.

They say to be a good farmer, you gotta kill a lot of plants. Well....