I've seen a few...very few and I'm rural NE Norman not far from you. The few I saw a week or so ago weren't even half an inch big...but I haven't seen any since then so maybe.....just maybe....the eco-system will keep their numbers down?! (Hope - Pray - Hope!) Since I'm so far rural & surrounded by wheat etc. fields....I expected to see more so prepared for the battle. So far...nada, zip, zilch.

Now that I said that - I'll go out tomorrow and my raised beds will be infested....I should have stopped while I was ahead.

I have plenty to go around, come and get them if you are missing them.

Until last week I had only seen two here, and one of those was back in March. I killed them both. But starting last week, I've been able to spot at least a dozen or so, every time I walk through the yard. And I can't pursue them all. We'll see.

Two weeks ago I visited a friend about 20 minutes North of here. His lawn was crawling with them.

I have been encouraged, in that a large group of sparrows has taken to visiting my main garden every evening. It's obvious that they are getting a snack, and that whatever it is, it's some kind of insect.

If I really look among our potato plants, I can usually find one or two potato beetles. But natural depredation seems to be keeping them completely in check.

George
Tahlequah, OK

I have seen them on and off since March, but not in really huge numbers like last year. The ones in March were large and likely overwintered. Most of the ones I've seen since then have been fairly small. When it is dry and not raining, I start seeing more and more, and then when it rains hard like it did last week and we flood again, I don't see them for a few days. I've only seen one this week, so far.

We're rural and surrounded by thousands of acres of mostly rangeland and river bottom land with some Wildlife Management Land not too far away as the crow flies, so we get them in waves all summer long. Last year was horrible but this year so far is mild by comparison.

Their population cycles up and down over the years, so I am hoping maybe this year will be the start of the downward portion of the cycle. Their eggs overwinter in soil. Given that Love County has had really regular and pretty heavy rainfall since the middle of last June, I was thinking maybe a lot of their eggs were so wet they weren't viable, or maybe the eggs were carried away in flash flooding, but just because that's what I'm hoping for doesn't mean it actually happened.

I use a grasshopper bait with the grasshopper-killing micro-organism Nosema locuste in it every year. When I start seeing small hoppers in abundance, I spread it on the plants in that area. For me, the key plants to watch for early hoppers are lemon balm and catnip. When those plants start getting lots of holes, I spread the bait. That usually is in April. I use Nolo Bait and/or Semaspore, whichever one I can find when I need it. It has a brief shelf life, so you cannot really buy it ahead of time and hold it. Once you get the Nosema locuste active in your grasshopper population, it can spread and kill more hoppers. For example, since grasshoppers will even eat one another, if a healthy hopper eats a dead hopper infested with Nosema locuste, then the healthy hopper can become infested with it and die. Unfortunately, these baits work best on small hoppers in the younger instars and during cool weather like what we have in April and early May. Once the hoppers are bigger and the weather is hotter, it is much less effective. I can use it to practically wipe out all the hoppers in April, but then new hordes of them, already in the larger instars, fly in during the summer months anyhow.

Grasshoppers are so awful some years, but in other years, even though I see a lot of them, they do not seem nearly as damaging. So far they aren't that bad here yet.

The most effective treatment I've ever found for them in the summer months is a wheat bran bait laced with Sevin. The last time I bought some, Planet Natural was the only source for it here in the USA. It is called EcoBran. Normally, Planet Natural does not carry synthetic pesticides, but in the case of adult grasshoppers, there is no good organic solution for them when they show up in huge numbers, so they choose to carry this product despite the fact that it has a synthetic pesticide as its active ingredient.

I must have flooding-induced or heat-induced garden apathy this year. Or, maybe I'm just exhausted from trying to keep up with harvesting and canning the tomatoes, but if the hoppers are here.....I just don't care. They can eat the entire garden if they want, and I won't fight them. It is too hot and I am too tired. Maybe I need for one of y'all to slap some sense into me! Honestly, though, I have only seen that 1 grasshopper in the garden so far this week, and I had a pair of scissors in my hand and cut him right in half. I hope he decomposes where he fell and enriches the garden soil, but probably the harvester ants have found the dead grasshopper already and carried it off. Compared to the past few drought years, so far the number of grasshoppers I'm seeing here is really low.

Every year there is one pest in my garden that just drives me to distraction, but this year it is caterpillars of all kinds and not much else (well, except for squash bugs.....). That doesn't mean that huge hordes of grasshoppers won't come flying in any day now, but I'm okay with that. I've harvested a lot of the crops already, so the hoppers can feast on the foliage of whatever is left. I guess I'd be mad if they got my pepper plants, which have been slow to produce in the constantly waterlogged soil, but I've already harvested almost everything else, and the big tomato harvest will be done before we know it----in another 4-6 weeks.

I do have some EcoBran in my garden shed so I can use it if I need to. It seems more effective on the local, residential hoppers that are around all the time. Once they turn more locust-like and fly in from the rangeland in huge numbers, it cannot even kill them all.

Dawn

The only garden pest insects that I am seeing are small cabbage whites fluttering around everywhere. I had seen a few early, but in the last couple of days they seem to be everywhere. I still have a few broccoli and cabbage plants so I guess that is what they are after, but they seem to be hitting the cucumber flowers as well. I haven't seen a lot of damage to the broccoli, and they (or something) has been very selective on cabbage. One cabbage plant looks like a colander with all of the holes in it and another about 4 feet away has almost no damage. There is a walking onion planted near the untouched one, and the badly eaten one is next to the walk-way.

It is possible that the tower hasn't cleared the other insects for a landing due to the heavy mosquito air traffic in the area. Just awful.

I only had a small amount of broccoli planted from one of those mixed packs from Pinetree. It has been interesting to see them develop and decide what kind they are going to be. There is one problem though since I really need to plant one with a short DTM and these are mixed. A couple had button heads, and none have been really large, but I think that was mostly a weather issue this year. They have been very tasty, just small.

Dawn, harvesting certainly isn't keeping me busy this year. LOL My onion crop is quiet small this year, probably about a third of what I normally have. I finished digging potatoes today. The Yukon Golds were OK, but the red ones were still small and could have stayed in the ground longer, but I only use them as new potatoes anyway. The area where they were growing is being overtaken with lots of roots and vines coming up around the fence with all of this moisture (and not being cleared last year) so I decided to remove them so I can tame the 'fence forest'. There were so many poke sallet plants that it looked like I had planted them there, and I sure wanted to get them out before they dropped seed.

It has been very hot here until today, but I have worked in the garden a lot this week. Normally I am doing all of this in March or April, but this year I am doing what I can, when I can. Al and I both worked all day yesterday so everything would be ready before today's rain came. We didn't need to hurry since we were in the doughnut hole today and only got a sprinkle. I had to water the seeds and plants that I put in today. Except for the raised beds there is still plenty of soil moisture for the established plants.

It is a very strange gardening year and I have tomato plants that stayed knee high until the last few days and others that are reaching the top of their cages. It is hard to figure. I am getting a few tomatoes, and the cucumbers and pole beans just started producing this week. I'll probably cut the final broccoli heads this week and hopefully get the okra and melons planted. Hopefully our first Fall freeze will be late this year.

Carol, It is a very odd year and plants have behaved in strange ways. I've noticed that tomato plants all over the county look pretty awful---it really shows that we have had just under 50" of rain and tomato plants have suffered greatly with bacterial and fungal infections. I just don't see any reason to attempt to spray any fungicide when it rains every few days. At least now it is only raining 2 or 3 days a week instead of every day.

I cannot complain about the tomato harvest. We have tons of tomatoes, and not many of them worth eating because they are so watery and mealy, but they still make great salsa, and my peppers are finally producing a harvest.

Our potato harvest was huge and most of the potatoes were a very nice size, but the broccoli yield was poor. The cabbage harvest was much better, and it was the best spring bean season we've had in ages. Onions were a mixed bag---many rotted in the ground due to all the heavy rainfall, but the ones that didn't rot were great. None of them would have stored long, so I cut up most of them for salsa and froze them in the amount needed for salsa batches. I lost track, but think I cut up enough for 25 or so batches of salsa, and I'm using them up fairly quickly. We kept a few for fresh eating in May and those are about done, so I bought a bag of Vidalia onions this week so we at least will have fresh onions, albeit not from our garden.

Shortly after I planted watermelons and muskmelons to fill the rest of the onion best after the final harvest and the cabbage bed, we then had about 8" of rainfall in the following week, and those beds look pretty bad now. I'm not sure the plants will make it. They look like they are in danger of rotting off at the soil line, and they're in raised beds so there's nothing much I can do for them that I didn't already try to do. That's one reason I gave up on trying to plant hot-season crops to replace spring crops. We're just staying too wet.

I'm making salsa pretty much every day now, and intermittently harvesting peaches so I can freeze or can them and turn some into peach jelly. My garlic usually would be harvested by now, but remains green and not yet ready. I think the heavy rainfall stalled it and who knows if the bulbs will be any good when I finally get to harvest them.

Cabbage whites were horrible here and I hand-picked cabbage worms and also cabbage loopers endlessly in between floods. It also is a big year for cucumber beetles, so I'm guessing they thrive in persistently wet weather.

The corn harvest was great and the coons didn't get a single ear. Maybe they didn't want to get their feet wet.

If we don't get huge amounts of rainfall in the next week (and we should't), I still might plant southern peas for a fall harvest. I just hate the thought of planting them and then watching and waiting for them to sprout while the seed rots in the ground. Every time that I think I might plant this, that or the other, rain pours down and changes my mind. I have canna lilies in the garden that are 8' tall. Normally they top out around 6' tall because I don't irrigate them, but this year they're growing like there's no stopping them. In May they had stalled in the heavy rainfall, but they're making up for it now.

The weather is so bizarre. There are things I never did in April or May and now it is mostly too hot to do them, so some parts of the garden remain well-mulched and fairly weed-free and others are just a mess. Luckily, the messy parts are at the downhill side of the garden which no one can see from the road or driveway while the uphill parts are in really good shape since they had less standing water and I could weed them regularly. I feel very fortunate to have harvested as much as we did---some of my gardening friends just gave up after the Sunday flooding wiped out whatever was left of their gardens. The 1 to 3" that fell last Sunday was sort of the last straw after the 6 to 12" that had fallen a few days before (the night Ardmore flooded).

I'm operating in typical hot weather mode now----harvest first thing in the morning, going out to the garden most days right at sunrise. I'd go out earlier if I could, but I have to wait for it to be light enough outdoors to see the snakes. Then I water the plants in containers if they need it. Naturally, if I check them and think they don't need watering, we'll hit 95 degrees with blazing sun and a high heat index and the container plants will look wilty by late afternoon. So, then I run out and water them. If I check them in the morning and decide to go ahead and water them, it then will rain in the afternoon. That happened yesterday. I spend the hot part of the day indoors processing the harvest or cooking it for lunch and/or dinner. Then I decide not to go back out into the garden after dinner to weed or do anything else because it is too hot, I am too tired and the mosquitoes are too annoying.

Everything about this garden year seems off--from having to hold onions and plant them late due to waterlogged soil (if only I'd known how much worse the soil would get once May arrived!) to feeling like we didn't even have the month of May----we went right from a mild and wet April to a hot June with no real gardening time in between because every day the rain was keeping us indoors.

On the bright side, every tree we have has made tremendous growth with one flush of new foliage following another after every rainstorm, and there's tons of wildflowers for once. I am loving that part of this year. I expect we will set a new rainfall record this year as we're already surprisingly close, but don't think we'll set any harvest records at all.