Before we get to today's video -- it is about pest control -- I want to share with you that our online
course for pest control, called Creating a Healthy Garden, is going to be opening for registration
very, very soon. Keep your eye on the website at Gardenerd.com for details. Now on with the show.
Hey there, I'm Christy Wilhelmi from Gardenerd, and this video is going to be a continuation of
the last video which was answering your questions about what's bothering you this spring.
Today our topic is grasshoppers. Yeah, grasshoppers. They are my personal nemesis because they
can strip something down to a stick in no time. So let's talk about how they live, how they can die,
and how to protect your crops from them. First of all grasshoppers can live for about a year, maybe a
little bit more. And they are egg laying...they're an egg laying species. They lay their eggs, they pupate
in the soil - we're going to come back to that -- and then they hatch as nymphs. Little tiny tiny
green grasshoppers. And then they grow into the big fat, ugly, brown adults that you're used to seeing
in plagues, let's just say that. So what I want to focus on is that nymph stage and before egg laying.
This is, this is where we can most...uh interrupt the life cycle. So grasshoppers
lay their eggs, the females (obviously) lay their eggs in the soil and they only lay the [eggs] in
the top two inches of soil. This is important because you can disrupt that life cycle by just
digging up the soil a little bit. I'm not talking about rototilling. As I always say,
give your rototiller to someone you hate and let them destroy their soil. But you can take your two
hands and simply scratch up the surface of the soil over winter if your ground does not freeze.
Grasshoppers will lay their eggs usually in the late summer or early autumn
and then those will incubate in the soil over winter. And then they hatch in spring. So you see
where I'm going with this. If you can interrupt the life cycle by scratching up the surface, disturbing
the soil surface, those eggs will come to the soil surface where they will desiccate and die. Now of
course, that doesn't always happen but that's your best bet of interrupting the life cycle. The second
thing you can do, as usual, which I always come back to, is really boost your soil food web because like
everything that incubates in the soil, there's a nematode out there for it. The other thing you
can do is as soon as you see them emerge, and they're really tiny, that's the easiest time to
squish them under your mighty shoe, as I often say. Because they're not at the super gross stage yet
where... I have a friend who she would cut them in half with shears and that's too much for me.
I can't do that but I can squish them or jet blast them into the soil with a hose nozzle.
It may not always be effective but it's like the most I could do.
The other thing you can do is protection. Right? So yes, they're going to come out of the soil but if
you cover your plants that you care about with bird netting the grasshoppers are less likely
to get in there. I had a lemon tree that was being decimated by grasshoppers and I covered
the entire tree, and again this is a very dwarf bush habit Meyer lemon tree that's easy to cover
because it's small, because I keep them small like I teach in my books, and that makes it really easy
to keep the grasshoppers out. And my lemon tree was able to recover by keeping it covered for
like about six months to eight months. And then I was able to ... the grasshoppers... Oh! That's the other
thing you need to know. Grasshoppers run, usually a a really big infestation of grasshoppers will last
three years. So they kind of run in a cycle where there's a lot of them for the
first year, second year and then they taper off in the third. Or it can work in reverse. But basically
you're looking at a three-year cycle. If you see a lot of grasshoppers get on it right away. Interrupt
the life cycle as much as possible by disturbing the soil and then that will reduce the population
in the years to come. So when you see little baby grasshoppers, don't think, "Oh, how cute." Just think
like now is the time to get out the big guns. There is another approach that is a biological control.
It causes grasshoppers to get something called nosema. And it basically gives them a disease
where they go belly up. It's not something I like to do because there are other animals that
can be affected by nosema, and usually there's a specific nosema for the pest you're trying to get.
But you know, we've all heard about the bat nosema that is you know causing a devastation among their
population, so I'm really careful when it comes to applying those kinds of biological controls
in the form of disease. I'd rather stick with disturbing soil to interrupt the life cycle
and physical barriers. You'll find a lot more information about controlling pests in your
garden at Gardenerd.com and in my books, Gardening for Geeks, and Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden.
Don't forget to check out my new novel Garden Variety. It's a lot of fun and it'll get you
through the spring and summer seasons. It's a nice beach read too. Also our upcoming course
on pest control, Creating a Healthy Garden, will cover so much more than you saw in this video.
So check it out. It opens for registration soon. That's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed this
video. If you did, like and subscribe, and don't forget to turn on notifications to
find out when our next video comes online. Consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to
support all the free stuff that we do here at Gardenerd and of course, happy gardening.