My grandparent's lost everything aside from tomatoes last year. Fruit trees and everything else was stripped. They sprayed the yard several times with pesticides but it didn't matter because as soon as you killed what was in the yard, the pasture would provide more. It was awful. It's been cold and wet enough that maybe we'll have some relief this year.

Reed, We have had that in some drought years. At our house, 2003 (with less than 19" of rain that year) was the worst. It was similar in damage to what your grandparents had. It was pretty bad here in 2011, but was worse at Dorothy's and George's places in NE OK in 2012.

We always get the traveling hordes of them in July-August. They just move in one day by the hundreds or thousands and eat everything. Still, I've never seen or even imagined 30 million. IN 2003, they ate our fiberglass window screens, and the rag rugs on the wraparound porch after they'd eaten every living thing they could find. That year they stripped bark off fruit trees and ate the fruit off the trees before they could ripen. A couple of years ago they were stripping every leaf off every tomato plant in the Peter Rabbit garden. Nowadays I only plant cool season plants in the Peter Rabbit garden because it is directly adjacent to the neighbor's pasture and when the weather gets hot and that pasture dries out, all the insects and snakes just move to the Peter Rabbit Garden, and then the insects demolish it and the snakes take all the fun out of the garden for me.

We went to some wild fires in the Thackerville area and in western Love County last year where I know I saw grasshopper numbers 10 times higher than what we were seeing on our property, so I stopped feeling sorry for myself when I saw it was worse in other parts of the county.

I normally put out Semaspore when I see the hoppers are about 1/4" long roughly in April of most years, and that helps a lot with the local ones that are hatching. Of course, it doesn't do a thing for the full-sized ones that migrate in hordes later in the season. When we had guineas, they controlled the hoppers really well, but we haven't had guineas since a big predator outbreak wiped out all the poultry in our neighborhood several years ago. We have chickens and they do a reasonable job, but they don't eat nearly as many grasshoppers per day as the guineas used to. However, the chickens stick around close to the house when they are free-ranging and don't roam as far and wide as the guineas did.

When we lived in town, I might see a grasshopper or two a day in our yard. Out here in the sticks, you cannot even count them all some years. It is one of my least favorite things about living in the country. When we start seeing more than about 10 per square yard, the damage they are doing becomes really obvious.

Dawn

Already been seeing some 1"+ hoppers at Washita Point.
But I really don't mind them, I just catch them and take to the lake and release them(on a hook). Only bait that was good last summer.

Well, if you're seeing them this early, you'd better get busy fishing. :)

I don't mind them in small numbers. They're part of the ecosystem, after all. I do mind them when I walk out the door and there's 20 of them chewing the bark off the same young fruit tree....or they're eating all the foliage off the tomato plants. That turns me into a cranky gardener.

In an average year, they're not any more of a problem than any other garden pest and I just ignore them. In drought years, though, their numbers build and they migrate in to the green yards and gardens as the pastures dry up. Usually by the time they're that bad, the drought has shut down the garden so they might as well eat it anyway.

I spotted some small nymphs a few weeks ago. But nothing in the last week and a half. Soon as I start seeing regulars I'm going to get some Semaspore. What's worse than the grasshoppers, here, North of Tahlequah, are the blister beetles which follow them. When they hit last summer, that was the end of our tomatoes and most of our beans.

George

George, I remember that you, Dorothy and several others had severe grasshopper and blister beetle issues last year. For me, they were more of a pest in 2011 and 2012. Still, I have never seen them at the level that y'all had them last year. Someone posted a photo of plants that were just crawling with blister beetles and I remember thinking to myself that I was seeing more blister beetles in that photo than I've seen in my entire life. I think I have a bad outbreak here if I see a dozen of them in one day...and I don't mean a dozen in one place...just as dozen if you add up the single ones you see scattered around. Last year I did have 8 on my cucumber plants at one time, and I had garden scissors in my hands, so I cut each one in half and then took the scissors inside and washed them.

I'm never particularly happy to see blister beetles arrive, but I try to tolerate them as long as possible because the blister beetles eat grasshopper eggs. Last year, blister beetles didn't become a problem here at our house until August, when they started eating my pole bean and cucumber plants. I usually put on gloves and hand-pick the blister beetles off the plants, dropping them into a bowl of soapy water once they are doing an intolerable amount of damage.

You know, all our problems would be solved if it would just rain. In a nice average to wet year, I hardly see any blister beetles at all, and the grasshoppers are around, but not at levels that harm a lot of plants.

I did see nymphs several weeks ago, but then it turned back colder again and I haven't seen any since.

In my garden, all I have to do is monitor the catnip and lemon balm plants, both of which I allow to reseed freely. The earliest sign of grasshopper damage in our garden usually pops up on those plants. When I see that the tiny hoppers nymphs are eating those plants, I just scatter the Semaspore there. That's knocks back their population quite a bit.

Dawn