DAMN GRASSHOPPERS

 The weather here at 7500ft in Colorado has been and will be lovely. 50 at night, 75 during the day, severe clear. So, instead of writing, I'm helping in the garden, wrapping up the summer, nurturing the final, ripening phase of pumpkins, apples, zucchini,  pickle cucumbers, beans, and tomatoes. Fairly successful this year, except:::::

There is no garlic. The grasshoppers ate every stalk down to ground level. Most pickles were literally nipped in the bud. The spaghetti squash have bites in their sides, ditto many tomatoes, apples, and butternut squash. The potatoes were savaged and there isn't much underground because so many leaves were eaten away. The blackberry and raspberry bushes didn't bear fruit. They are lucky to have made it this far with a few leaves still showing. Forget the peppers, three varieties, and the cilantro because the grasshoppers didn't, and the plants died before they could get established.

What can you do? We tightly wrapped each raised-bed garden with anti-hail cloth (plastic netting). We spread some bacterial agent that makes them get tummy aches, but the levels remained high. No chemicals on my organic gardens, especially when I plan to eat the produce myself. You can get ducks and chickens, maybe eat them too later, but that's a whole 'nuther enterprise I don't want to get into. Snakes, but they've been scarce since the neighborhood filled in with houses.

Electric shock, like with a cattle prod?  Flame throwers? Big flyswatters? Venus flytraps or Pitcher plants - no, the grasshoppers would eat them as they came up.

The are few natural ways to control grasshoppers. The one factory that made a strong grasshopper bait burned down a few years ago. Farmers try all the usual tricks, but there are just some plants they no longer try to grow because the grasshoppers eat them to nubs.

We can go to the Moon, but we can't control grasshoppers.

So, I started this blog tonight to spread utter damnation over my colony of grasshoppers, but in a literary way. I started with Googling "Grasshopper Quotes", but the suggestions were almost insulting. Apparently, Emily Dickinson etc loved grasshoppers as symbols of nature, freedom and happy songs. My grasshoppers don't sing because their mouths are always full.  Other literary quotes were equally fantastical, warm and fuzzy. I searched for half an hour for someone to quoteably hate grasshoppers, but no one did. I guess Shakespeare wasn't a gardener.

I think I'll stay in my writing lab tomorrow.