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Monday, June 13, 2011

Then there was an ARMY...

This is what I found in my raised bed today.  An Army of tiny grasshoppers.  Literally, an army.  This was the largest cluster of them that I could photograph all in one frame with you still able to see that they are grasshoppers.  At first I didn't notice them as I was going about my watering of the garden.  Minding my own business, I watered the nearby apple tree with no issue.  Then I turned the hose to the garden box and it literally came alive!  Little tiny green things exploded out of the box, hopping every which way and freaking me the heck out!  I dropped the hose, which totally drenched my leg (thank you) and did that scratchy thing you instinctively do when you see a million insects of any kind.
  After regaining my composure, I knelt down to try to figure out what I was up against.  And wouldn't you know I came face to face with 3 grasshoppers sitting on the green top of one of my red onions.  Grrr!  I knew we had large grasshoppers, I had seen them around and killed as many as I could...my favorite is when they are munching on my flowering plum tree which is still quite flexible and I grab as high on the tree as I can, pull back and fling them out into the street where they smash on the pavement and get eaten by the crows.  Very Looney Tunes, the whole tree catapult thing.  Anyway, I must have missed one and it must have thought that my vegetable garden looked like the perfect place to lay a million grasshopper eggs (by the way, I don't know how grasshoppers reproduce, so don't e-mail me telling me how wrong I am about Grasshopper life cycles).  So now my garden is overrun with a million baby grasshoppers and I have no idea how to get rid of them.  I can't just go around smashing things - I'll kill my garden!  And I DON'T want them to eat it all.  So what do I do?  I'd like to keep my garden as organic as possible, so what can be done about the Grasshopper Hoard that has taken up residence?  By the way, those things are about the size of my 5 year old's thumb nail...the biggest one I saw was about the size of my pinkie nail.  Still very small considering the one I have been finding (and killing) in the garden are usually about the length of my middle finger and the thickness of a large man's thumb.  Giants.  I don't want to let these babies grow up to that!  Help!!!!

1 comment:

  1. My chickens love grasshoppers. Do you have chickens? The mama chickens especially like to feed the little ones to the chicks.

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