I rounduped a stretch of our lawn along the edge this past spring
when my wife said I could use it for a garden. I ended up planting
short sections of purple morning glory, purple okra, bush cucumbers, and
3 hills of pumpkins.

This is the first time in 22 or 23 years that I've grown pumpkins. I
was able, for the most part, to train the vines to grow lengthwise along
the fence. The push mower takes care of the smaller side vines when
they stray. The entire area filled up nice by August 1, and we had
about a dozen pumpkins on the way.

Then disaster struck - powdery mildew! I've been treating it with
fungicide, and I believe I mostly have that under control now.
Unfortunately, it took a lot of healthy leaves with it before my
sprayings got it under control, and it appears to have weakened the plants.

Horror of horrors, another disaster soon followed - squash vine
borers! I noticed small piles of frass coming out of tiny holes in the
main stems of most of the pumpkin vines. The increased stress of this
attack, added to the weakening from the powdery mildew attack caused the
pumpkin to abort a number of healthy looking pumpkins, some of which
were already 8" across. Now I'm down to 5 of the larger pumpkins,
though there are a few new young ones that seem to be growing.

I got out there with a wire and some seven insecticide concentrate,
shoved the wires in there where I thought the vine borer larvae were,
and then poured tiny bits of sevin into the holes. I'm not sure how
that will turn out, but at least I've tried. In the past, when I had
squash vine borer problems, I typically lost the plants completely. I
think I may be helped this time around, because I have a soaker hose
that I ran along the plants before they vined out. I can slowly let the
drops ooze out, which of course gets the soil under all of the vines
soaked. Since I just grew these on top of the sod, there isn't as much
between the vines and the soil as there typically would if I had used
straw. I believe that these plants may have roots coming down from many
of the places where the leaves are.

The main question I'm left with is this: where are the BT (bacillus
thuringensis) vine crops that we were promised about 6 years ago? I
recall hearing news reports that they were very close to incorporating
the BT into squash and pumpkins, and when they did the squash vine borer
would no longer be a threat. I've looked for any vine crops advertising
this every year since I first read it, but haven't come across any
advertised as vine borer resistant.

http://www.bt.ucsd.edu/bt_crop.html