Grasshoppers

I am looking out my study window and see a weed with grasshoppers stacked on it loafing.  When I walk outside, it is like the parting of the Red Sea as they get out of my way.  This is a bad year for them.  We had a lot of moisture early, then it was very dry.  Grasshoppers thrive in such conditions.

Getting rid of them is hard.  Unfortunately, they are very hard to get rid of.  If you put out a product such as NoLo® bait, which contains Nosema locusae spores, it gradually infects the grasshoppers with a fungal disease and kills them.  It works best on young grasshoppers, because they have less resistance to the disease, and it takes time.  The grasshoppers will not all keel over immediately.  On the other hand, this disease only infects grasshoppers and will not hurt other life forms.  Birds that eat the dead grasshoppers do not get sick, and neither does anything else.  The spores stick around and new grasshoppers get infected with them.

Contact Poison.  You can use a contact pesticide such as carbaryl, also known as Sevin® dust.  That will kill the grasshoppers immediately.  It also kills beneficial insects and can harm other organisms.  It has no real residual effect in that it isn’t long before the grasshoppers in neighboring areas come into the nice uneaten area and start munching.  That makes for a frustrating summer.

Tobacco is banned. The old timers in this area used to use the juice from their chewing tobacco to poison the grasshoppers.  That it does, but it kills everything else, too.  In fact, tobacco dust or juice is banned in organic farming, even though it is organic, because it is so poisonous. The nicotine will kill a child or pet that gets it on them, and make an adult sick as a dog.   Be careful about using folk remedies.  They may work, but have a lot of unintended consequences.

No easy way. There is no easy answer to grasshoppers.  You can plant a decoy crop around your garden that grasshoppers really like, spread the NoLo® bait around it, and hope they die before they get to your vegetables.   Grasshoppers are definitely a plague and have, in the past, totally wiped out farmers and caused famines after moving through.  While our solutions leave a lot to be desired, we can prevent that from happening today, at least here.

For more help gardening, buy my book, Preparing A Vegetable Garden From The Ground Up
Available in print or ebook from Amazon.com or other retailers, this book walks you from choosing the site of your garden all the way through what to do after the harvest. Buy a copy for yourself or a friend today!