Minrose, there are three things I do so that a milkweed shortage isn't a problem if monarchs come early: 1. My common is planted on the south side of the house where it gets lots of sun and little wind. Some of my stalks are already between 1-2 ft tall. 2. I pot two tropical milkweed every year and bring them inside for the winter. tropical amazingly flowers all winter long 3. I take cuttings from the tropical at the beginning of march and put them in water. Cuttings grow much faster than seeds after they're planted and the stems are thick so they won't be easily broken by wind or careless kids/pets BTW- tropical will also give you later monarchs as it stays viable longer than our native milkweeds When I went by the park milkweed I was also shocked to see their milkweed was just as big as mine! I think it's prairie milkweed though....but the section I walked by also gets lots of afternoon sun. I think all this rain is helping too...Bye Bye Drought!

The hoppers are always so much worse in the drought years, but so far I have avoided spraying with a chemical pesticide. I generally rely upon the beneficial insects and animals to help keep the pest insects under control, so using a broad-spectrum pesticide, whether organic or synthetic in nature, is something I avoid as much as possible. I normally put out either Semaspore or Nolo Bait whenever I see hoppers in the 1/4 to 1/2" size because it is most effective when they are in the younger instars. Normally that is in April or even May. I don't even know if any of the stores would have Nolo Bait or Semaspore this early and don't know if I would buy it now if they did because it has a very short shelf life. For a long time, our guineas controlled the hoppers pretty well but ever since the unfortunate year of the cougars, in which all the poultry in our rural neighborhood was virtually wiped out, I haven't had the heart to get guineas again. One of our neighbors did get more guineas the year after all of us lost our poultry, and lost many, but not all of them, that next year. My chickens, when allowed to free range (which depends on how much the hawks and other predators are hanging around), control them fairly well, but I don't let the chickens into the actual garden during tomato season because they'll peck tomatoes. One year the grasshoppers were really awful here, maybe in 2003, and even were eating our fiberglass window screens, the bark on the fruit trees (after they ate the leaves and the fruit) and even the cotton rag rugs on the wraparound porch. A lot of the ranchers here sprayed and sprayed and sprayed, and still more hoppers just kept coming. I didn't spray, but had used Nolo Bait and felt like it wasn't working..... Then, one day, a neighbor stopped by and wanted to know why we didn't have grasshoppers at our house. (I thought we had plenty!) He explained that as he drove up the road every day, hoppers flew en mass from the bar ditches alongside the road, except at our house, where they didn't. So, I think that even though I thought we had a lot, apparently we didn't have as many as everyone else did. Since then, I do keep a better eye on the local population. When we go to wildfires, brush fires or even mere grassfires outside our local neighborhood, sometimes I am stunned by how many grasshoppers I see. I think the Nolo Bait really helps keep their numbers down, but then in late summer when there are huge bunches of them migrating in, there's not much that you can do. In that summer when the ranchers sprayed their rangeland like mad, we lost all the bluebirdswe had here. I didn't see another bluebird for about three years. That influenced me greatly and I don't think I'll ever spray a broad-spectrum pesticide no matter how bad the hoppers are. Seeing them out in January could be a positive thing. Maybe the weather will turn back significantly colder and they'll freeze.

Dawn2, We've had grasshoppers hatching out since Feb. down here in our part of the state. The warmer it gets, the more we see. We had huge numbers of crickets last year, but about an average number of grasshoppers and locusts. Since it runs in cycles, we'll probably have a lot for another year or two before their populations head into a down cycle. I really don't worry about the crickets or locusts, but the grasshoppers can be very destructive. If these critters are being a problem or a nuisance, I have the solution. : ) Really, I have two solutions--one that is more of a country type solution and the other one is more of a city type solution. Out here in a rural area, our primary method of grasshopper control on our 15 acres is guineas. One guinea can eat 2 lbs. of grasshoppers a day. Once they eat all of ours, they go next door and across the street and start cleaning up all the neighbors' grasshoppers (and ticks, and other bugs as well). Of course, free-ranging guineas wouldn't work in town. (They don't respect fences and go wherever the bugs are.) If anyone in a city setting wants to do something to cut down on the number of grasshoppers and similar pests, the time to do it is now. The most effective remedy we've ever found is an organic product called Semaspore. It is a bacteria-laced bait. I think the bacteria is Nosema locustae. You scatter the bait around, and the hoppers and other family members then eat the bait only to find themselves attacked by the bacteria within a couple of days. Once the bacteria has begun working its' evil on the pests, they stop eating within about 24 hours and begin to die. It may take a few days for them to finally die. And it can take up to a month or more for all the grasshoppers to find the stuff, eat it, get infected, and die. It is not a "quick kill" type product but it is an effective one. Ideally, you put out the bait as soon as you start seeing newly hatched hoppers, crickets or locusts. It works best when they are in the smaller instars, roughly between 1/4" to 1/2". The larger they get, the less well it works on them. One thing you need to know about any product that contains Nosema locustae as the active ingredient--it has a shelf life of only a few weeks if unrefrigerated, and up to 5 months if refrigerated. So, only buy as much as you need to use within a brief period of time. Also, check the package. Somewhere on the package it should have either a "use by" date or a "packed on" date. Be sure you are not buying old Nosema locustae because it loses its effectiveness as it ages. I have found Semaspore on the shelves of VERY reputable nurseries that was far beyond its expiration date, so watch out. And, I haven't even told you the best part yet. Grasshoppers are canabilistic. So, once some infected grasshoppers die, then more grasshoppers come along and eat them and then THOSE grasshoppers get infected and die. For this reason, once you get a little colony of Nosema locustae established on your property, you may not have to put out the product again that year and sometimes not for several years. We had a severe drought going on here in '98 when our house was being built, and in '99, when we moved here. (I think '97 had been a bad hopper/locust year too.) I put out Nosema locustae 4 times that year, about once a month beginning in March. By late summer, we didn't have much of a hopper problem even though everyone else did. I may have used Semaspore once or twice since then, but the guineas take care of the hoppers on their own most years. I've linked some info on Semaspore, which is just one of the available products that have Nosema locustae as their active ingredient. There are others, and I think one of them is named Grasshopper Attack. Our wooded acres are full of locusts and I don't worry about them. (Of course, I would do something about them if they were being really destructive instead of merely being loud.) It is mostly the grasshoppers around the house, yard and garden that become a problem, so that is the area where I scatter the Semaspore. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Semaspore

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