Monday, July 26, 2010

The Year of the Hopper

2o1o marked the first year that I didn't plant a garden or a single tomato plant.

Most years I go overboard and have way too many plants for our family. Every year I plan on doing lots of canning and freezing of fresh vegetables. Eventually the weeds get out of control, and I end up with way too many zucchini plants. So we would buckle down and weed the garden. We would get it looking good and then the cows would decide to jump fence to have a light snack at the salad bar. Nothing ends up getting canned or frozen and I always end the year saying next year the garden will be bigger and better!


For some reason I didn't get the garden planted this spring. It could have been because of this little guy






or maybe I wanted to just enjoy my husband farming his

fields of corn, sugar beets and beans.




Or maybe it was because I knew that the grasshopper population


would explode and take over the world.







The destructive little 'buggers' have stripped my chokecherry bushes of leaves,


eaten the rhubarb completely off,


and wrecked havoc in my yard and eaten off what perennials I had left from"that pig."


http://trio-of-sisters.blogspot.com/2009/08/we-have-another-dog.html








Now they are moving through the fields and the

guys are working non stop to get everything sprayed

before they destroy the crops.


Thankfully they sprayed my yard.


Now we can walk through the yard,


without wading through thousands of insects.


Next year Dani we will have pickles!

5 comments:

Mary said...

I have never seen so many grasshoppers as I did while at my mom and Trudy's last weekend! I commented on how many I was killing by driving over them as they covered the paved road. I am sure the farmers were happy I was killing so many of them!!

Sister One said...

I spent almost two hours out spraying this morning .... they completely leveled sixteen peppers, three rows of onions, and all of my spinach.

I'm getting chickens and geese next year!

SisterTwo said...

Trudy did you get the yard sprayed? It has worked very well in my yard, except I have lost about 15 of my pond fish. It must have drifted into the pond water. It's sad to see the fish die but I'm glad the grasshoppers are gone.

Mary- Thanks for doing your part.

sisiter 3 said...

Hey, I like the new background on the blog.

For some reason we haven't had grasshopper woes, but we are having a crazy outbreak of voles.

those pics remind me of this scene from little house on the prairie where a swarm of grasshoppers ate all of their crops. (we just listened to that in the car.)

cant' wait to see you guys soon!!

Sister One said...

Sister Three --- I'm telling ya, get some hungry cats. They'll make mincemeat of your voles!