Susan, I love your light stand and always will love it. I realize it was the best solution for you, but if I told Tim I wanted to buy one of those, he'd hand me a hammer and tell me to build my own....which is why I have the one that I have. : ) Mine is hidden away out of sight in a room where guests rarely venture, although anyone who knows me and who knows I raise my own seedlings always asks to go upstairs and see it in the spring. So much for putting it out of sight....I just should have set it up in the dining room or breakfast room or something.... I am sure you'll be deliriously happy with it and will have many wonder seed-starting adventures and I look forward to hearing all about them. I think you got a great deal considering it was Gardener's Supply. I never buy anything of theirs for full price. They have sales often enough (and especially in November when, I think, some of us gardeners are shopping for ourselves) that a person can be patient and get a good price during their periodic sales. I've noticed that prices often are not as good in December when gardeners' spouses or family members are doing what I call "panic Christmas buying" and cannot afford, time-wise, to wait for a sale. I don't think you were repetitive at all. The more we all share about what we do, how we do it and why we do it (as well as pointing out what didn't work for us!), the better for all of us to learn from one another's experiences! Carol, Our weather is just like yours. Our high was 70 degrees yesterday and it was so gorgeous outside I could hardly stand it. I wanted to jump up and down and scream "Spring Is Here!". That was exacerbated by the smell of the orange blossoms on my little orange tree. However, I controlled myself because I knew it was a false spring and that winter was returning today. It was 56 degrees around 7 a.m. here at our house and now it is 36 degrees and we have had very, very light rain but lots of thunder. Phooey on winter! I think you showed those folks at the co-op that one benefit of being a gardener is that it keeps your muscles and joints strong, healthy and fit. I'd rather "work out" in the garden any day, than walk on the treadmill or work out on the weight machine. Who wouldn't? Trees, Nope, sorry, I just haven't gotten to it. I am trying. Watch for it in a couple of hours or in the morning. I'm about to start typing mow after I close up the chicken coops, put out the deer corn for my favorite deer, refill the bird feeders (those little birdies are eating nonstop today trying to stay warm), etc. I'm kind of dreading going out into the cold wind but I need to do it now before it gets dark. I have to warn you that I don't use the same planting schemes every year because I don't want to get stuck in a rut, but I'll try to mention some of the planting schemes in my usual rotation. Dawn

Jill, Unfortunately, once the grasshoppers are larger than 1/2-3/4" of an inch in length, they're a lot harder to kill. You may have more luck in the garden with the small ones. I try to garden as organically as possible, but the danged grasshoppers have driven me to use one synthetic product. It is called Ecobran and is a wheat bran bait that contains 2% Sevin. It seems pretty effective, though I don't us it often. The reason I chose EcoBran over spraying Sevin or Malathion or anything else is because, since it is a bait, it only affects pests that eat it. That means it generally doesn't harm beneficial insects, which I think is important. I keep a sealed container of it in my potting shed and when I notice fairly large numbers of grasshoppers in the veggie garden, I sprinkle it over their favorite plants....or whatever plants they are on when I see them. In my mixed cottage garden that contains veggies, fruits, herbs and flowering ornamentals, the hoppers seem to show up first on Lemon Balm and on Catnip, both of which are scattered randomly around the garden precisely to attract the hoppers. The grasshoppers just flock to those two types of plants, and I scatter the EcoBran there. I see smaller numbers of hoppers within 24 hours, and see a real drop-off in the population within a few days. I usually only have to use it once or twice a year. This doesn't mean I don't have grasshoppers---I have them all the time. It just means that the EcoBran keeps their numbers down. Anything you do to control grasshoppers has to be part of an overall plan...not random efforts. So, here's what my overall plan involves: 1) As soon as grasshoppers start hatching, if there is a significant number of them compared to other years, I buy and use Nolo Bait or Semaspore. Both contain a microorganism (Nosema locuste) that kills them. Sometimes I see hoppers hatching out in January if it is a warm winter in southern OK, sometimes I see them in May, but usually in a typical year I see them in March or April. Nosema locuste kills them after they ingest it. It takes a day or two, but they stop feeding almost immediately after eating it. Best of all? Well, the microorganism lives on in their body. Since grasshoppers are cannabilistic (there isn't much they won't eat), it then infects and kills the next grasshopper that comes along and eats the body of a dead grasshopper. How cool is that? However (and there always is a however), there are limitations to its effectiveness. First of it, it is a living microorganism that is most effective in cool weather, so I normally only use it in April and May. Secondly, it is most effective on small hoppers, roughly in the 1/4-1/2" size. Third, it is not necessarily easy to find. I can get it in a couple of different nurseries or garden supply places about 80-90 miles south of me in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Unfortunately, it is a very popular organic remedy and sells out. However, you can find it online. Just be careful if you order it online. I ordered it from one place that took too long to ship it and it arrived too late to be useful. This is doubly frustrating because....Fourth, it has an expiration date. There is nothing worse than having something arrive to late to use and then its expiration date is less than a week away so you cannot save it and use it later. When I buy it, I only buy the quantity I can use in the next few weeks, and I store it in an extra refrigerator out in the garage which helps ensure it works well when used. I really like Nosema locuste and use it about once every 3 years. Normally I buy a one-lb. container and spread it around on the garden, yard and areas closest to the house, yard, garden, etc. I use it all up by spreading it once. One year, after grasshoppers had been horrific the year before, I bought a 5-lb.container of it and put it out about once every 3 or 4 weeks beginning in early March through the end of May, and covered a larger area that usual. That worked amazingly well, so much so that a local rancher stopped by one day and asked what I was using for grasshopper control. I was sort of puzzled because, after all, we all had grasshoppers all over the place. He explained that when he drove up the road every day, he noticed huge hordes of grasshoppers flew up into the air from the side of the road as he drove by---except when he drove by our house. He said he hardly saw any on our property. (I really hadn't even noticed that myself until he mentioned and then I started watching as I drove up the road and realized he was right.) So, while we still had grasshoppers, we didn't have as many as anyone else. It has been probably 6 or 7 years since I put out the 5 lbs. of Nolo Bait, and I think next spring I'll do it again. That's part of the overall plan, but it likely won't help you much now unless you can find some of this product (Nosema locuste is found in more products than the two I mentioned, it is just those are the two I've used) and use it in the garden ASAP. I'll link a source, but I have no idea if they can/will ship it fast enough to help if you decide to try it this year. I'd sure use it next spring though. Nosema locuste seems most effective in cool, rainy spring weather, and I think that likely is because those conditions are perfect for this disease to thrive. So, that's the recommended biological control. If I was trying to deal with a major grasshopper outbreak on a long-term basis, I'd use the Nosema locuste whenever the hoppers are hatching out and are in the smaller instars. Then, I'd use EcoBran to deal with the regular influx of them that begins in early summer and continues until cold weather arrives in the fall. These are the safest and most organic way to deal with hoppers. Even though EcoBran contains Sevin, it is only 2% and it is in a bait that must be eaten, so it only affects the insects that eat it. I like using a more narrow-spectrum pesticide in that way as opposed to spraying a broad-spectrum pesticide. Now, for more ideas on how to deal with a major outbreak in hot weather: 1) Mow, mow, mow. Keep the grass cut as short as you reasonably can. We always keep our lawn mowed, but we live on acreage and let the pastures grow mostly unmowed, at least until the hopper outbreak is in full force. Once the hoppers are present in high enough numbers to do significant damage, we mow the grass short. It really does cut down on how many hoppers you have. Unfortunately, we have grassland (unmowed for the most part) on all sides of our property and there's nothing we can do about all that rangeland, which is the natural habitat of grasshoppers. That's where my hopper troubles sort of grow in magnitude as the summer goes on....if we are watering the garden and yard and it is green while the unirrigated rangeland is drying up and browning....guess where the grasshoppers go? That's right. They move to the green areas. If you garden organically, there's not a lot you can do about the summer influx of hoppers. I let my chickens free-range and they'll eat a lot of them, but they cannot eat them all. I also keep bird feeders full and have bird baths for the birds in order to attract wild birds. I believe the wild birds eat grasshoppers and other pests in my garden because my garden is full of songbirds all day long....and the bird feeders and bird baths are close to the garden, but not in it, so they are coming to the garden to eat insects. An old-fashioned way of dealing with them is to mix some water with molasses and put it in quart canning jars (or old food jars from purchased spaghetti sauce or something) filled halfway to the top. Put the jars in the garden. The hoppers go into the jars to drink the water and drown. I've done the same thing with alfalfa tea (just put handfuls of alfalfa rabbit feed into 5-gallon buckets of water and let it sit for a few days). Lots of pests are drawn to the alfalfa tea and drown in it.(Obviously I wouldn't leave 5-gallon buckets half full of any liquid sitting around if there are small children around who could fall in head first and drown in the bucket). We had guineas for years and years and they are grasshopper-eating machines. I just had trouble keeping the guineas alive because they are loud and call attention to themself and that attracts predators they eat them. Still, in a rural area, they are a big help. Oh, and my chickens free-range only during the day and only when I am at home to rescue them if a coyote or hawk comes calling. At night and when we are away from home, they are securely locked up in a fenced chicken run with a roof that keeps the predators out. If you want to go the chemical route, clearly it is time to try something other than Sevin, since it clearly isn't working as well as you'd like. If I were in your shoes and I wanted to spray something synthetic, I'd probably use Malathion. However, since I strive to garden as organically as possible, I've never used Malathion, so my recommendation of it is based solely on having friends who believe it is a somewhat effective grasshopper control. My main objection to spraying any broad-spectrum pesticide is that it has the potential to kill all the insects, when many of the insects are beneficial and helpful to you. In a typical garden or lawn-type situation, about 95-97% of the insects you see are beneficial, and only about 3% are harmful. I hate to hurt the large population of good insects in order to kill the small population of bad insects, but sometimes you have to make tough choices to do just that. Watch this summer for blister beetles. While they generally are a garden pest, they have one redeeming quality----they simply devour grasshopper eggs. The blister beetles are usually present in large numbers from about July onward, and will seek out and eat grasshopper eggs for as long as the weather allows them to do so. This is very, very important. The more you have blister beetles eating hopper eggs in the summer and fall, the fewer grasshoppers you'll have hatching out the following late winter or spring. Some people spray their desirable plants with a kaolin clay product called Surround WP. It leaves a thin white coating that looks kind of like dust on the plants you spray with it, and that coating can repel some pests, including grasshoppers, because it makes the plants unappealing to them and it can gum up their mouths, When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I knew gardeners, including some family members, who would sprinkle plain all-purpose flour on their garden plants (using a flour sifter) in pretty much the same way we use Surround WP nowadays. They believed the flour gummed up the grasshoppers' mouth parts. I tried that in 2003 when the hoppers were incredibly bad here, and I couldn't really tell it worked and I hated the way the plants looked. The Surround WP is more subtle than flour. It is a wettable power that you mix with water and spray on the plants. Unfortunately, the larger grasshoppers get, the harder they all to kill and, as you undoubtedly know, they can migrate and travel in huge hordes in the summer months, continually seeking out lush green vegetation to feed upon. I don't know if anything I have said here will help, but if you use pretty much all the above in a consistent attack, you can lower the number of grasshoppers you have. If you are in a rural to semi-rural area, you already know that they move into green areas as rangeland dries up. and if you wipe out one bunch of them, more keep coming. If you are on rural land and you or someone in your family is a registered pesticide applicator, you can use Dimilin on rangeland, though I don't know if it is labeled for anything other than rangeland. My friend, Fred, uses it on his ranch during bad outbreaks, but isn't entirely happy with its efficacy. Neither am I. During our last really huge outbreak a few years back, the ranchers sprayed repeatedly with broad-spectrum pesticides and our bird population dropped tremendously. It was 3 or 4 years before some of the birds seemed to have made a comeback. That's one reason I have so far avoided using a broad-spectrum pesticide. There are some broad-spectrum organic pesticides, like Spinosad, but I just won't use any broad-spectrum pesticide if I can avoid it. Some people have sprayed neem oil on plants and feel like it reduced the number of grasshoppers feeding on the plants, but only when the grasshoppers are small. On larger ones, it seems less effective. I'm going to link the grasshopper page from Arbico Organics because it shows some of the products I've mentioned. The last time I purchased Semaspore and EcoBran, I bought them from Planet Natural. You can find them by googling. I no longer use them since they messed up two orders in a row and then took forever to process the refund for a product I never received. I'm done with them, but I mentioned them for you because I don't know of anyone else who was carrying EcoBran other than them back when I bought it. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Page of Products For Grasshopper Control

Beth, you probably have Passiflora incarnata which is a native vine in Oklahoma (as well as many other states). There is probably some info on the Internet about sowing the seeds, but I would winter sow it - does need some stratification in order to germinate, but some say that a GA3 treatment is necessary. You can buy it at gardening centers. Some say it is difficult to grow from seed because it contains a natural growth inhibitor, and others say it is easy. When someone tells me it is difficult, then I gotta take up the challenge. I just ordered seeds so we can compare notes on our progess! I also ordered P. ceurulea, common name of Blue Crown passion flower, and will try them, too. Years ago, I bought a vine labeled "Purple Flowering Passion Vine" at Warren's (now defunct) in Midwest City. I later ID'd it 'Lavendar Lady'. It is gorgeous. Comes up late spring, but grows very fast, and produces beautiful, fragrant, purple flowers until frost. It bloomed this year until late November. Anyway, one of the parents is P. incarnata. Cuttings are extremely difficult to root, so propagation from seed is virtually the only way to reproduce this vine unless you buy one off the internet, or from a local nursery (good luck!). Prepare to be inundated by Gulf Fritillary butterflies when growing this vine, because it is their host plant. They will eat it to pieces, but they will not kill it. The ultimate reward is beautiful long winged orange butterflies with silver spots on the underwings that glisten in the sunlight. They will stay in your garden daily. Variegated Fritillaries also use this vine as a host, but are not nearly as prolific as the Gulf Frit. Try soaking your seeds a couple of days before planting them. I have also heard that this helps. Susan Here is a link that might be useful: Growing Passion Flower From Seed

George, That's what I thought too. I expected last years 78+" of rainfall (beating our previous record by almost 20") would ensure drowned grasshoppers and eggs. So, I was wrong. However, they are appearing much later than usual so that's good at least. Dawn