Something is killing my beautiful organic squash

[Hushpuppy]

I made up my own organic soil and planted some squash as I love squash. They have been growing so great and are full of fruit but suddenly yesterday afternoon I saw one of the plants it terribly wilted. I thought the afternoon heat had dried out that section of soil so I watered them. The sick plant seemed to pick back up a little then today is is looking like it isn't going to make it. I have them in baby pools with a little bit of rock on the bottom for drainage through multiple holes cut into the bottoms of the pools. I pulled back the pine straw and found small slugs on the soil. Would they be eating the roots? or is there something else that would eat the roots and cause this? Until today I have had chicken wire fence around the pools to keep out any dogs, cats, rabbits or anything to big to get through the holes. Since they are so well established and will be soon pulling squash off of them, I removed the fence. The problem occured before removing fence.

 

[Hushpuppy]

Here are the squash. You can see the plant on the left is the only one affected. There are no bugs anywhere that I can find any evidence of :confused2:

 

[Rosebud]

The first thing that came to my mind is verticillium wilt. I have no idea, look it up and see if you can do an autopsy on the plant..It is a disease, a pathogen. So seems like they all would have gotten it... Good luck, that is maddening.

 

[JCChronic]

Could it be possible it was choked out by the healthy ones roots

 

[Hushpuppy]

Thanks guys. The one plant has died while the others are thriving. I did discover that there were multiple slugs on the soil below the pine straw, around the dead plant. I don't know if they did it (slugs will eat up marigolds) but I put down a bunch of slug killer around all of the plants and haven't seen anymore problems.

 

[WeedHopper]

Check this out. I found my problem before it killed my Squash.

hxxp://www.walterreeves.com/insects_animals/article.phtml?cat=21&id=428
hxxp://blog.pennlive.com/gardening/2009/08/squash_attacked_by_puffy_white.html