Artemesia wrote:I used to live and garden in South Dakota, so I know exactly what you are going through. I found that tilling several times in the fall helps since it disturbs their larva. It especially helps to have poultry come in behind your tilling to eat the larva. Tilling again in the spring with poultry following will help to remove any remaning pupa. Planting oats and peas also helps since most of them do not like oats and peas as much.
Yes I don't know if many on here quite truly understand the amount of grasshoppers I'm dealing with. I don't really have any chickens on my farm as my dogs would most definitely eventually have them for lunch lol. Good advice though I'll definitely till the hell out of it this fall and the spring anything to put a dent in them. On the bright side they don't seem to be hurting the corn all that much, although there literally still are are hundreds of them so I'm sure they are doing more damage than I think.
imafan26 wrote:I'm lucky, I only found one grasshopper in one of my three plots, but I also found a praying mantis egg case on the fig tree, so they are on the job. The one good thing about having birds raid the garden so frequently, they love grasshoppers.
I'd love to have preying mantis's but I'm sure that they would never survive our winters, if they somehow did that'd be a bonus.
rainbowgardener wrote:Encouraging birds in the garden is helpful against a lot of pests. Be sure you have a bird bath, bird houses, bird feeders (even seed eaters eat insects part of the time).
Oh yes I do have a LOT of birds around the farm, I'm not sure if barn swallows eat grasshoppers or not but one day I had a Stephen King novel amount of barn swallows invading my farm lol. (here is my other post on that
https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/vi ... 39&t=54146
But yes I have running pasture stream in the front yard and acres of shelterbelt trees including hollow dead trees for them to nest in. So I'm pretty bird friendly, not to mention my dogs keep the squirrels away. I actually set aside about 4-5 acreas of streambottom land that used to be pasture specifically for wildlife, its full of native grasses and you'd be amazed at the amount of growth I've had in the 8 or so yrs since I've done this. The birds love it and this year somehow I've got stands of wild sunflowers that are about 8-10' tall so I'm sure the birds are loving those.
I'm not too much on using bird feeders becasue some of the birdseeds have seed that I don't really want spreading about my property. Thistle seed stuff like that, I'd rather let the birds take care of themselves they've done pretty well without me so far and they keep coming back.
I might however make a wren house or something for the garden specifically for wren because I heard they eat cabbage loopers and that been a big problem for me this year. Or is there any one species of bird that loves grasshoppers? I'm guessing they all do, I mean if I was a bird I'd probably even eat a grasshopper I'm sure they are tasty j/k lol.
Well either way though the corn isn't looking too bad, not great but not bad either. Its more my own fault for planting the rows too close together.