Sounds like spam for dinner to me. Just a thought.

Well, Sorry. But in order to fight and be a winner, you have to to know who the enemy is.
It is the same fighting in the garden. You can not kill all the bugs, insects, fungus, etc by spraying the whole garden with the most powerful chemical. Each insect, each disease has to be tackled differently.

It would probably help to post some pictures. Plants have to be checked night and day to see what is eating them, bug wise. Early in the season slugs ate every seedling as soon as it came up in my garden. I re-sowed, spread out some slug poison (after trying organic methods with no good results). The second sowing was successful. I doubt that the ants on your corn are harming anything. Are they herding aphids? If so, just wash them off and the ants will leave. It's best to know your enemy and tailor your responses.

Don't kill all the pollinators! Just a few of them. Were the green caterpillars on parsley or carrots? They may be swallowtail butterflies. Are there holes chewed in your (bean) leaves? Are there holes chewed into in the base of the squash stem? Cilantro tends to die after going to seed, probably not your problem.

I'm really thinking you may need to have a soil test/analysis done.

Stop killing everything. Spiders won't hurt your plants, they'll kill some harmful insects. Ants almost never hurt plants, they go where the damage has already been done.

Sometimes certain insects can be a big problem in the garden, but you have to know what they are and what they're doing. Otherwise, leave them be and invest in fertilizer, not bug spray.

Taking a chemical bombardment approach is usually not productive. You wipe out the good bugs and throw the whole system off balance. Spiders are good. They eat the bugs that eat your plants.

Almost no spray kills slugs, which can be rather destructive. I use iron phosphate baits for them.

You say the vegetables started dying, but don't describe how. What's your watering system? How's the drainage? Poor drainage can be a big problem.

Be careful around the black spiders with orange markings, might be black widows. Also look out for the brown recluse spider. Either can give a nasty bite.

I hear you about frustration of little critters eating everything. I'm in maybe year 3 of veg gardening in SoCal and as others have said, it's a learning process helped along by identifying what's doing the eating at a given time. Looking at plants at night usually doesn't teach me anything, maybe I just have bad timing and never catch them in the act. With leafy crops BT works well, and sometimes I feel like the Captain Jack organic bug killer helps. Fertilizing helps but don't overdo it and don't overwater. I plant from seed so when things get eaten I feel less cheated than when I've bought seedlings. And I've learned what grows well here and doesn't get eaten as much, so I plant lots of mustard and rocket. Just keep trying different things.

I sympathize with your frustration. I am kind of a novice myself. Most people are not terribly successful their first year (although some are).

I think you should stick to one or two crops next year, check it every day, and post pictures if you notice any problems.

You didn't talk about sunlight. Do you get enough?

Could gophers have done-in some of your plants?

Every place is different (and every crop), but in the places I have gardened, it is rare to have bugs do so much damage that you get no crop at all. Slugs and snails can destroy tiny little plants before they ever get a chance to get going. Birds also sometimes eat seedlings. But if you get past that stage, and water is OK, usually it is not too bad.

In small gardens, you can probably control caterpillars by squashing them daily.

I have ants all over my corn, too. Most likely this means the ants are farming aphids. I ignore them. This by itself will not prevent you from getting corn.

--McKenzie

But the OP doesn't really say little critters are eating everything, only that plants are dying. What evidence that insects are the problem? Was it insects that kept the squash plant from producing? Or was it the OP's bug spray that killed the bees so no squashes were pollinated?

Be careful around the black spiders with orange markings, might be black widows. Also look out for the brown recluse spider. Either can give a nasty bite.

A bit more than a nasty bite! They are poisonous! Nancy

Something ain't right with the soil. Bugs are just telling you your plants are weak and need to be wiped out. Bugs won't bother a healthy plant. The BRIX is too high.

Most insect issues are like the common cold - they resolve themselves in 4 weeks if you do something about them or a month if you do nothing. Pest species will build up to a point, at which point predators will find them and the system balances itself.

Aaaahhh, gardening! It's always a learning experience. Some people here have given you good advice. You need to find out what these pests are before you spray. You also need to learn the consequences of spraying. For you squashes, I would guess squash bugs or cucumber beetles - but impossible to tell which without a description of the bug. You can spray or dust to get rid of them, but you will most likely kill the bees & worms in you're garden. In that case, you need to be the bee and pollinate your flowers. Otherwise, you will have healthy plants and no squash.

Whenever I've tried to grow cilanto, it seems to go to seed before I even realize it. It does not like hot weather. I think that slugs & snails might be fond of cilantro as well.

The green caterpillars could be horn worms. They are Satan reincarnated! If they are, kill them, all of them, any way you can.

In my garden, I also have issues with slugs & snails. Lots of people use slug traps, but I've never had luck with them. I squish them. Gross but effective.

I think Thomas Edison said, " I didn't fail. I found 10,000 ways how not to make a light bulb." I like to embrace this philosophy when gardening. Its always a learning experience.

This year I learned, a perennial flower bed around the vegetable garden will not keep out rabbits and deer. They either run through it or hop over it to get to the vegetables. So a rabbit fence will be going back up around the garden. Somehow the deer still do respect the fence even though they can jump over the fence.

So to some up:
1. Find out who the enemy is.
2. Find out ways of getting rid of (treating) the enemy
3. Find out the consequences of using various treatment BEFORE using them.

Read a lot about gardening, soil, the balance of nature and what plants need.

Don't try to kill everything.
Gardening is a learning experience. Experiment. Try things, take notes, educate yourself.

Put up a fence. Read on the forums about what kinds of fences work best for which pests.

Read the pest forum for ideas and good info.

Wishing you luck and a time when you can relax and enjoy your garden with few pests. Patience. You'll get there.

One more thing - look up each plant you are growing and find out what to expect from it. Cilantro, for example, doesn't last all season. You have to keep sowing it at intervals. Going to seed is what it does.

Wow. Just like people that have a health problem and get a prescription. Then another prescription. Then another. Pretty soon the prescription meds are fighting each other and totally destroying the person's immune system that was made to take care of the body.

The garden will pretty much take care of itself if you just stand back and watch. Yes, you will lose some things but you will gain more in knowledge about the garden and about yourself.

It sounds like you declared war and the first thing you did was to kill off your own troops. Then you were left to go it alone.

Beneficial insects are your helpers in the gardens. How will your squash get pollinated (along with other things) when you killed off the pollinators? You started out right to try and build up your soil. Think of things as needing to stay in balance. This is a good forum for help, and pictures are useful.