The main problem for the trees is that they'll be entering the winter season with very low carb reserve in the root system. With the grasshoppers devouring the leaves, your trees have not been able to manufacture and store photosynthates. That's bad enough in and of itself! But they are using what little energy they have to make more leaves at the time of year when they would ordinarily be shutting down. That's a BIG double whammy. It will be next spring and summer that will reveal the extent of the damage. It takes enormous stored energy reserves (which your trees simply do NOT have) to produce the spring flush of growth. Your trees will attempt to remetabolize (is that a word?) carbon stored primarily in the root system....at the sacrifice of that already tapped out root system. The very best thing you can do is what you have already done...mulch and provide water if needed. I would avoid any kind of fertilizer that might force artificially rapid growth, so that the trees can begin to recover at their own rate. IF they can. Trees, if they are reasonably healthy in the first place, can bounce back from insect defoliation, but not if it happens over and over. Since this is only the second year, I'm going with Dan on this....your trees have a pretty good chance of recovering.

Dorothy, It is hard to decide what to do when it is this hot and this late in the season. Normally, I'd broadcast Nolo Bait or Semaspore, but it is only effective on them when they are in the younger instars and are about 1/4-1/2" long. I am assuming the ones you're seeing now are larger than that? I also think Nolo Bait is more effective in early April temperatures than in the kind of temperatures we're having now. I don't use Nolo Bait or Semaspore every year--usually only if I have a really heavy infestation in early to mid-spring, which I didn't have this year. Since it is so hot and so late, I suppose I'd declare war on them and employ the use of the big guns. In 2010, the hoppers hit us incredibly hard here in June and stripped the tomato and bean plants in the Peter Rabbit Garden down to bare stems in just a couple of days. It was like something out of a horror movie about the Dust Bowl Days, when the hoppers migrated in hordes and could eat the little vegetation then found on someone's place in hours, not days. I was just shocked at how quickly they destroyed that part of the garden. Feeling like it was too late and too hot for Nolo Bait or Semaspore, I went to Planet Natural's website and ordered EcoBran. It is a bait product that basically consists of wheat bran laced with 2% Sevin. I was shocked when they began carrying it since they're all about natural, organic remedies, but then, realistically speaking, there are no organic remedies that do a quick kill once you have hordes of migratory hoppers/locusts. So, I ordered it and used it and--BAM!--the hoppers diminished greatly. I won't say they all went away, but they mostly did. I never saw large numbers of dead hoppers lying around, but the damage in the big garden stopped. (It was too late for the Peter Rabbit Garden.) Last year, when the big crowds of hoppers showed up in June, I broadcasted EcoBran around the garden twice, one week apart, and never had any more trouble with them. I know they were around, because I saw them, and I even grumbled to myself about how the EcoBran hadn't seemed to work that well because hoppers were all over our property. However, I did notice that while they were all over the yard and fields, they were not in the veggie garden. Then, a couple of weeks later we had a huge wildfire at the west end of the county and I spent 2 or 3 days out there, and the grasshoppers there were mind-boggling. I would say they had 10 times as many hoppers per square yard out there as we had at our house. Suddenly, I was thinking that the EcoBran was pretty awesome after all! The unfortunate thing about EcoBran is that it is pricey and you have to pay shipping. So, I was thinking to myself that I needed to find a recipe to make some sort of wheat bran laced with Sevin this year so I wouldn't have to spend that kind of money again. Guess what? I googled 'homemade grasshopper bait recipe' and found several. I've linked one of them below. I hate using any sort of liquid synthetic pesticide, or for that matter a dust, that you spray or broadcast all over because of the potential harm to beneficial insects. However, since the Sevin-laced bait only kills the pests that actually ingest it, it seems safer to me to use it than to use a liquid or a dust. In the past I relied heavily on guineas and chickens, but we never replaced our guineas after that horrible cougar and bobcat year when all the poultry in our neighbor was wiped out by predators. Our chickens control hoppers in the yard, but I am not inclined to trust them to free-range around the garden because of the damage they do. During our early years here, I always put out Nolo Bait at the first sign of hoppers in spring, but didn't see enough this spring to think that was needed. Apparently they were just late to arrive here, because they are all over the place now. I also used to do the mason jar/molasses thing where you half-fill mason jars with water to which you've added some molasses. The hoppers come to drink the sweet water and drown. I only found it moderately effective, but it was better than nothing. I've also had luck with molasses water in yellow Tidy Cat buckets.....I think the yellow color attracts more than the clear glass jar does. So, I guess if it were me, I'd either order some EcoBran (they were terribly slow to deliver mine when I ordered it last year---I think I waited 5 or 6 weeks for it and I was not a happy camper) or, more likely, hunt down the ingredients in the linked recipe and try making my own version of a grasshopper bait. Fred always sprays and he always has more hoppers than we do, so I am not convinced spraying helps enough. The last huge outbreak we had, which might have been in 2005, all the ranchers sprayed and all the bluebirds died. I can't prove a connection, but I strongly suspect there was one. Birds will eat them, but as you well know, when the fields are full of thousands of hoppers per acres, the birds cannot eat them all. So, I've linked one of the recipes I found by googling. If you don't want to make your own bait, EcoBran is available online at Planet Natural. Be prepared for sticker shock, though, cause it is pricey. Let us know what you decide to do and how well it works. If the grasshoppers are this bad in May, what in the world will July be like? Will this be one of the years they eat the bark off the young fruit trees and the fiberglass window screens like they did in 2003? The thought of that sends a chill up my spine. I have started seeing blister beetles lately, and though I abhor the damage they do to tomato plants, I tolerate them because they do seek out and eat grasshopper eggs. Sounds like we'd better be hoping for a huge outbreak of blister beetles! Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Recipe For A Grasshopper Bait

Good morning fellow venters, gardeners and insomniacs, Look who's talking here Carol. You were up as late as Dawn, and had the first post of the morning. I'm not out there sunrise picking. Ain't nothing to pick. After coffee, I'm still going back to bed. (Maybe). I started this at 8:00 AM and it's 10AM now. I was up late making yogurt from raw cow's milk. Trying to restore my bones and health. Anyone else do that on here I wonder? I finally found a local pristine source of grassfed Jersey cow's milk. Love it! My folks had a little Jersey cow for me as a toddler and beyond. Yup, I'm trying to talk Braum's into joining the so-called new raw milk revolution, which isn't actually new but practically as old as the earth itself. DS wouldn't touch the stuff unless it comes from a carton. My doctor thinks adults don't need and shouldn't use milk. Strange. Anyways, what he doesn't know won't hurt me. You have my sympathies, on the Japanese beetles or any other nationality. And I can relate to Dawn's woes on the gazillion hoppers. I've never seen so many. Are we going to have a revival of the Great Locust invasion? Lord, I hope not! I can remember when my first born son was a baby and we lived at Waukomis, near Vance AFB near Enid. We had a grasshopper invasion of biblical proportions. Carrying DBS in one day, a huge hopper jumped up and bit him on the ear drawing blood. Like everyone else, I hate and dread hoppers. I read on the Internet, grasshoppers were the only insect ever to be fought by using dynamite. It would be an LOL if it weren't so sad to see how destructive these things are. Do you think we're under a curse? Makes one wonder. Back to venting...it's now officially open season on veggie, melon poachers, & chicken thieves, but MUST we be restricted to just those, and not their other creative endeavors of how to rip people off? Carol, having been an AF wife, maybe you can relate to this...you know how it would make one feel to have a young DH die, leaving 3 young sons without a dad, and a young wife to raise them. So, this was my first departure from living a relatively sheltered life after my DH died. I had rented my house to these people while we were in Texas to check it out to see if we wanted to make a permanent move. Boy, was I naive back then. They were supposed to make a monthly deposit to my bank account for the rent payment to cover the cost of my own mortgage payment. They didn't. I finally had to come back and have them evicted. After moving back in, someone came to the door wanting to haul off all my furniture. These "renters" had taken out loans using my furniture as collateral and then defaulted on the loans. As bad as that was, the worst was they'd broken into a locked storage unit, and stolen the carefully folded US flag from my DH's military funeral, which had been kept for my DS's. One of the few but most precious remembrances of him. Then, not too long after that, we were having dinner at a local restaurant, and here these people were sitting across from us, eating lobster dinners, including their two preschool kids. Since of entitlement? I guess. That was the beginning of a long list of other lessons learned along the way. One of the interesting things I've made mental notes on to stop doing for, were those who complained about what you gave them and then walked off not even saying thanks. Maybe you've never had that happen, but I have, and it's always left me scratching my head, because I would never give anyone something that wasn't fit to use, or good to eat. Well, this list of mine could go on and probably will. One of the signs of advancing age is when one starts rambling. 2nd cup of coffee later:) Dawn, there is NO way I am going to go out in this weather, even in knee high rubber boots picking plums in fence rows braving snakes, in order to make jam or jelly, even if I have to buy plum and blackberry jam til mine start producing better. Those folks that do are welcome to all the plums and blackberries they can pick. Every rock and bush out there has a snake somewhere around it. Now, I watch every step I take even in my own garden where I feel relatively safe. Knowing y'all are busy with harvesting and preserving, I'll try to keep my dumb gardening questions and traumas to a minimum. I think it's just absolutely lovely envisioning all the wonderful things in your pantry, and root cellar. Carol, the one thing I regret making from last summer was all that pickled squash. Most of it is still sitting in the pantry. I guess could still be kept for several years if a famine hits. The great squash famine. With my luck and squash bugs, ya never know. Stay cool y'all, it's supposed to be pressure cooker hot again today. Barbara

Diane, You're welcome. Yes it is fiction but it is based on the drought that hit the Great Plains from approx. 1949 through 1957. During that period of time, rainfall averaged less than 40% of usual and many cattle ranchers were driven out of business. In one year in the 1950s, Lubbock, Texas, recorded no rainfall. So, the conditions were not unlike the Dust Bowl days although by the late 1940s the Soil Conservation Service had put many programs into place that prevented, largely, a repeat of the dust storms of the Dust Bowl years. I believe Mr. Kelton wrote this incredible book to put a human face on the suffering of the Texas ranchers during that time, when many of them were driven out of the cattle business. It was because of the 1950s drought that Texas embarked upon an ambitious program to build reservoirs so they could stockpile water to avoid a recurrence of the Dust Bowl Years and the 1950 Drought years. When you read "The Time It Never Rained", you can just put yourself in Charlie Flagg's shoes and imagine how horrible it was to not even be able to feed your cattle or sheep and, eventually, yourself and your family. For Charlie, there were some things more important than 'saving the ranch at any cost'. He wanted to do things his way and maintain his independence. He didn't want to take a 'handout' from the government and he didn't want the government telling him what to do or how to do it. He just flat didn't want to compromise his own principles. That's part of what makes the book so fascinating---it wasn't just a struggle with nature, but an internal struggle to stay true to what he believed in. I had relatives who farmed and ranched in Texas in the 1950s and 1960s and they thought Elmer Kelton captured the reality on paper so well. "The Time It Never Rained" is a great classic western tale and it is one of the reasons the Western Writers of America named Elmer Kelton the greatest western writer of all time. For as hard as times are now, this novel is just such a chilling representation of one fictional man's life during some incredibly hard times, and that's why I like it. It reminds me how easy we have it much of the time, and it reminds me that when you make your living from the land, it can be a hard life with, perhaps, more downs than ups. Can you tell I love this book? Dawn