Was in the herbal garden working last night and I was so sadden by the death of so many of new transplants... it hasn't rain for quite a while... I know... before it was raining about every day... but the ground doesn't know to hold it's moisture... but I was just sick to see over 30 new herbal tranplants dead... and I was down there just the middle of last week... the saddier part is that season is too far along to start some of these plants again... ;- {

course, life has been busy... have had a lot of out of town company that stays for days at a time... so not down there like I should...plus trying to keep the veggie garden going...

then to make me sicker... odd, I'm in my herbal garden right??? but the grasshoppers are eating what is alive... I was mowing around the plants... I have dutch white clover in the walk ways to lessen the work load plus add nitrogen... when grasshopper come hopping out all over...

at least they should be healthy ... they ate most of my echinecea, hyssop, belladonna and boneset to the point of killing the boneset!!!!

so will try smudging the garden later tonight and bring some healing energy back to it... but any thoughts on ridding of those varmits the grasshoppers in the mean time???

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001

Answers

Turkey poults are good grasshopper eaters, that is if it's fenced. Seems they do this their first year. Good luck Sherry

-- Anonymous, July 10, 2001

Folks on GardenWeb were just lamenting the same problem. The two suggestions that sounded worthwhile (other than avian bug Terminators) were to use floating row covers over your plants to exclude the hoppers, and someone else suggested in the case of severe infestations scooping them up and selling them as bait or else possibly to pet stores for feeding frogs, snakes, and lizards.

There used to be a product being sold that was supposed to kill grasshoppers, something like milky spore, but I haven't seen it in a long time -- perhaps someone else knows something about that.

-- Anonymous, July 11, 2001

Hi there, one thing I know very well is grasshoppers. Depending on where you are and how large the hoppers are there are a few organic things that you can do. Row covers are out if it's over 80. The plants will die from heat stroke. You can take a hose end sprayer and fill half of it with listerine (yucky yellow kind...generic is fine) and the rest with either an antibacterial dish soap or Gain laundry detergent ( I have tried other soaps and they don't work as well) and then spray the hoppers in either the very early morning or late in the evening just before the sun goes down. This should give you some knock down. Then you can put out bowls of 7/8 water and 1/8 molasses. They will jump in and get covered and drown. Shade cloth is an option for covering although it isn't exactly cheap.

The biological control is nolo bait and i wouldn't waste my money on it. It's supposed to be spread at the rate of one pound per acre when the hoppers are in the nymph stage and if they are largerr than a quarter inch it's too late. I spread fifty pounds on 3 to 4 acres last spring and still lost everything to hoppers. Best of luck to you, they are a bear!

-- Anonymous, July 11, 2001

Sorry, I forgot to stress that you DO NOT want to use the spray in full sun. It will burn the plants. The listerine somehow speeds up the killing and you also want to avoid your beneficials as this will kill spiders and such as well. It doesn't seem to affect earthworms or ants though.

-- Anonymous, July 11, 2001

I"m sorry to hear about your poor herbs Yarrow. I don't have any advice about the grasshoppers, but I do have a comment about the boneset. It's my understanding that boneset likes it's feet wet. Whenever I've seen it out in the wild it's either been on the banks of a stream or on the edge of a swamp. Maybe the dry conditions in your garden weakened it, and then the grasshoppers just finished it off.

I know that I have boneset tincture, and I think that I may also still have some dried boneset if you need some. Same goes for the echinacea.

-- Anonymous, July 11, 2001

Hi, Yarrow, I don't have an actual cure for your grasshopper problem, but I know how to at least reduce the numbers. I found this out when I built my next to the last house, back in 1977. I was sitting out in the yard, watching these little birds flying around, when I noticed that I had all sorts of scraps of one by lying around (scraps from putting on siding that morning). It occurred to me that I could easily build a couple of birdhouses from this wood, instead of using it all for kindling.

I made birdhouses with a one inch diameter hole, since that looked about right for the birds' size.

The birds I made the houses for never moved in, for whatever reason, but the houses were soon inhabited by house wrens. When their babies were born, the mom and dad each spent every hour of daylight flying back and forth with grasshoppers to feed them. The babies gulped 'em down, and spent the entire day peeping, "more, more, more!"

I'd say that the babies must have eaten at least one hundred per hour, between them all.

JOJ

-- Anonymous, July 16, 2001