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

Mosquitoes are a problem sporadically for us, but since we tend not to have the heavier rainfall many of you have been having, they're not much of a problem right now. We do have a huge platoon of dragonflies and damselflies who look for food relentlessly all day long and they love mosquitoes, and we have lots of birds (including Purple Martins) and bats that eat them too. I also put Bt 'israelensis' granules or dunks in all our standing bodies of water...like the rain barrels, the ponds, etc. Suzie, It can be very hard to identify caterpillars since there are over 300,000 species of Lepidoptera worldwide but Susan might be able to tell you what it is since she is into butterfly gardening. On the website linked below, there are additional links that identify known butterflies and moths of Oklahoma. If the damage to your shrubs rises to the level that you feel like you need to treat the caterpillar infestation, you can spray your shrubs with Bt 'Kurstaki' which is a toxin manufactured from a bacteria that specifically targets caterpillars. It is organic and won't harm anything other than the butterfly/moth larvae. It is easily found in stores and the products that have it as their active ingredient include Thuricide, Dipel and Safer Caterpiller Killer. In the veggie garden, I generally just handpick cats off plants because I have so many flowers there that attract butterflies and moths, and even desirable caterpillars like those of the Black Swallowtail, so I don't like to use Bt there. In an ornamental shrub bed, though, I wouldn't hesitate to spray with Bt if the shrubs had considerable damage. Anna, I'm in Love County and have not seen any decrease in fire ants this year (I wish I had), so I don't think the winter affected ours even though our low temps this winter went down into the single digits a few times. We had them all over the place beginning about late March and running through mid-May. Since the rain stopped in our county and the heat cranked up into the mid- to upper-90s, they've gone underground the last 2 or 3 weeks and I'm not seeing them as much, but I bet if it rained they'd pop up out of the ground overnight. I still find them in raised beds in the veggie garden when I'm digging or when I'm pulling weeds, and I still run over an occasional mound when mowing. I only treat mounds in the veggie garden and in my container-grown vegetables, the dog's fenced play yard, and the backyard where our granddaughter plays and I only use organic fire ant killers. We have almost 15 acres, so there's no way we could afford to treat all of it. In the past I have used some non-organic fire ant killers, but because we have a lot of edible crops in the form not only of vegetables but also fruit trees and berry crops, I've stopped using all nonorganic fire ant killers. We have oodles of native ants of all kinds, but the evil fire ants dominate the ant world at our place. We also have red harvester ants in and around the veggie garden, but I leave them alone because they are a food source for the horned toads and because they clean up the carcasses of dead insects. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Butterflies and Moths of Oklahoma

After reading all these comments, I'd like to say that drying your front-loader gasket thoroughly after finishing your loads is something you just need to do- it takes less time than writing these comments/questions! My Electrolux is 10 years old and I always left the door open; with a dehumidifier in the room I thought that was enough. I was wrong. I love this washer, but bought a new HE top-loader ( a big expense for us) and returned it after one day- it was worse than useless. We ordered a new gasket, since I realized that over time the old one had molded and was not salvageable. My husband replaced it with the help of the video and the instructions that came with it. He is handy but had never done anything like this. It was not as difficult as you might imagine and was totally worth it. Now I get down on my knees on my garden kneeling pad and just dry it completely, and put in vinegar with blue jeans loads (this also helps set the dye on denim if you don't want them to fade too fast). I also use vinegar and hot water for towels. Once a week or so I run a hot cycle with vinegar and dry the gasket, and leave the door open. I do not use chlorine bleach at all because of the environmental impact and because of sensitive skin. Also use fragrance- and dye-free liquid detergent, and I'm wondering how much of an impact these ingredients are having on the mold problem y'all are having. All is well, still got my good machine. Dry that Gasket!

So, fire pagers went off for a horrific wreck on the interstaten a few minutes ago, and my heart breaks for the families of those involved. I expect Tim will be out there for a few hours. Since we don't take Fire Rehab drinks/food to wrecks on the interstate....but I'm wide awake after Tim got up and left for the fire station.....I figured I might as well be here. Maybe now, in the quiet house in the very early morning hours, I can catch up. My dream would be to do so and then to fall back asleep, but falling back asleep is not something I'm good at doing. Jennifer, Thanks, and I was sleeping well until suddenly I wasn't. Still I actually do feel rested. Don't worry about the potatoes going in a tad late. You're doing fine. We can be so hard on ourselves when sometimes we ought to just celebrate the fact that we're managing to get the garden planted. Congrats on getting all your cool-season greens and brassicas in the ground. I planted some of mine last week, but have a lot more to do this week before I can claim victory and say I'm done. I 'think' the ground finally will be dry enough to plant them Monday or Tuesday, but only if we don't get a lot of rain today/tonight (and we shouldn't). I used a trowel to turn over the soil at first, and then a shovel to get deeper soil flipped over to the surface so the excessively wet mud can dry out some. Since we had a few very windy very warm days, that soil has dried out a lot the last 3 or 4 days. It is about time. Now, just watch for anything that wants to dine on your fresh green plants. Wild birds often attack my young lettuce seedlings with a vengeance, and in rainy springs, the pill bugs and sow bugs prowling the mulched beds require the use of Sluggo or Sluggo Plus to keep those little crustaceans from eating the brassicas and greens. Sowing definitely is a word....... Artichokes are gorgeous plants and each one is like a piece of sculpture in the garden. When I grow them, I like to put them in the northwestern corner of my garden where they are in morning sun until noon or 1 pm and then in dappled shade the rest of the day. They take up a huge amount of space, so plant accordingly. Since we have such a long growing season, I prefer to space most artichoke varieties 4-5' apart. Does yours have a variety name or was it just labeled generically as an artichoke? Rebecca, I do really like David's Garden Seeds. I always try to support small businesses in our region because regional seed suppliers have become so rare and we're lucky when we find one who carries the right varieties for our part of the country. I believe David's now has a brick-and-mortar store in San Antonio too. You did get a lot done! That's terrific. I'm just like your mom with spinach. I like it so much that no matter how much I plant and grow, it never is enough. Amy, Congrats on the front door opening and everything! : ) I can relate to not being able to take DH into a grocery store. Yesterday we stopped in at Central Market to get 2 things--Dr. Bronner's lavender soap and some fresh fruit for Lillie. I really just wanted her to see their amazing produce session (which did impress her with its huge variety, though she pronounced some fruit, like the Sumo oranges, too ugly to buy and eat). So, I was aiming for a quick walk-through. It didn't really happen. Our cart wasn't quite full (we had one of the small mini carts) but we bought a lot that wasn't on my mental list when we went into the store. Our downfall was the bakery area, which impressed Lillie even more than the produce section. Somehow we left the store with Lemon Ricotta cookies (blame that one on me), a loaf of sourdough bread, a cherry pie (Tim) and a Maine wild blueberry pie (Lillie). We consulted one another and decided that as long as they baked goods contained fruit, we were 'eating healthy', (grin) This always happens. If I run into a store alone with a list, I usually can come out with only what's on the list. I hoard cardboard too and everyone in this family, except the cats, know to leave my cardboard stash alone. Chris, being a great gardening enabler, often saves up his cardboard and brings it to me. I might be the only mom in American who is thrilled when her son brings her empty cardboard boxes. Rebecca, My back doesn't like 50-lb bags of anything. It really doesn't even tolerate 40-lb bags well any more. I've been hauling a lot of wheelbarrow loads of compost and mulch lately and my body really feels it. At this time of the year, I just cannot find a way around doing things that makes my body hurt, and know that I am not alone in this. I don't know what you can do to keep squirrels away. I don't remember if you tried sprinkling red cayenne pepper on the soil in your containers to keep them from digging in the soil last year. If not, that is worth a try. Did you try spraying your fruiting plants with Hot Pepper Wax? I would hope that would deter the squirrels but am not sure if it will. A smallish yappy dog like a rat terrier can help some people keep their garden free of small animals like squirrels and rats (and aren't squirrels really just rats with big fluffy tails?). However, with your Teenage Mutant Ninja Squirrels, I'm a bit worried they'd terrorize a smallish dog and possibly take it hostage and carry it away. For extra nitrogen, have you considered blood meal? It might attract buzzards (it does here) but it is a nice high-nitrogen organic product. For something with a significantly higher N amount, you'd have to get one of the pelleted, slow-release lawn fertilizers that is nitrogen only. Eileen, Collards are an old-fashioned southern staple that's certainly having their moment lately on cooking shows. I grow a lot of them some years, and less in other years. This year I have a lot. Jennifer, Ever since I saw that news story on the light ballast fire, I turn off our grow lights when we leave the house. It probably slows down the growth of the seedlings, but I don't care. It gives me peace of mind. Honestly, I don't think ballast fires are that common, but they do occasionally happen. Jacob, I hope you're having a nice visit with your grandparents. Our neighborhood was so very quiet when we moved here....still had a dirt road, not many neighbors, and a bridge north of us was being taken out and rebuilt so we had very little traffic for a couple of years. So, flash forward almost 20 years and now we have a barely-paved road (basically loads of gravel and tar poured on top of dirt road), a perfect bridge, a few more neighbors and tons, tons and tons of more traffic than I ever thought we'd have here on our roadway. We tried to move far enough out into the boondocks that growth wouldn't catch up with us, but it has. We aren't moving again. At least all our closest neighbors live on acreage, so new folks who move in still aren't too close to any of us. I'm not opposed to people, per se, but just prefer a quieter lifestyle. Livestock (cows, horses, goats, chickens, etc.) still drastically outnumber the people here, but there's a lot more human beings around here than there used to be. I'll try to ID the weeds on a separate post. This one is getting long and I don't want for it to suddenly disappear mysteriously, which sometimes happens on my computer. I don't know if it is the computer or GW, but I'd hate to lose this and have to start all over. Dawn