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Observations on Grasshoppers

Thekla McDaniels

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posted 2 weeks ago

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2025 was a terrible grasshopper year here.

They are pretty bad again this year. I planted a lot of small trees and piles and piles of different seeds earlier this year.
In my faithful every other day hand watering I have been in an ideal situation to observe grasshopper preferred foods.

What they have eaten, while leaving neighboring plants alone:
Lemon balm, Itoh peonies, hollyhock seedlings, cucumber starts.

Maximillian sunflower has a category of its own. They ate a young plant to the ground, leaving only a few stems. Haven’t touched it since.

Blackberry also has its own category. Some different plants have been eaten, some have not been touched. Could be related to variety or location or both.

Plants they have taken a bite or two of, and may be about to obliterate: nanking and choke cherries, elderberries, comfrey, plantain (plant, not the thing that looks like a banana)

Plants as yet untouched: strawberries,
locust seedlings, both black and New Mexico, white mulberry seedlings (fruit comes in all colors, species is alba, it’s the kind silkworms eat and the leaves are high protein and edible. Parsley, squash seedlings.

I will be adding to this list, and hopefully, others will also make contributions. The object is to create a data base that will suggest possible trap crops.

It would also be fun if a few grasshopper resistant varieties emerged.

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Yeardly Arthur

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I've always wondered how one might turn the tables on grasshoppers and use them as fertilizer. During the 17-year cicada emergence in 2024, we had thousands of big, fat insects pop out of the ground all over our neighborhood. Every few days I would gather the husks in buckets for high-nitrogen mulch, and after a couple of weeks I could rake the spent bugs into piles and bury them in our garden plots. Best year for tomatoes EVER.

Back when Japanese beetles were first becoming a problem, a neighbor would let me empty his traps twice a day. I'd dump them by the pound in soapy water, wait a while and pour the soup around the veggies.

I hope we never have an infestation of grasshoppers, but if it happens I'll have to cycle back around to this thread and see what they like best to eat. Maybe they could be lured into big box traps and added to the compost pile...

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Thekla McDaniels

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Yeardly, it’s a topic for endless contemplation! 😊
I have guineas, but only 5. They like my neighbor’s field better than mine but they ignore property boundaries so, what does it matter to me which side of the fence they forage, it’s one population of grasshoppers.

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Matt McSpadden

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When I first moved to a previous property there was about a 1.5 acre field that was crawling with grasshoppers and crickets (pun intended). It must not have been as bad as your situation though, as my garden was barely hit. I guess they had enough food elsewhere. I rotated my chickens all over it and boy were the yolks dark yellow/orange that year :)

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Thekla McDaniels

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Horseradish seems to be well liked by grasshoppers here in Western Colorado.

But the horseradish seems to grow fast enough to stay ahead of the grasshoppers.

I had a young peach tree, had set a few dozen peaches that grew to about half size. The grasshoppers ate the leaves and soft twigs, they ate all the bark, from ground to branch tips. They ate the fruit off the pits. The xylem and the pits were all that remained!

I wonder how the peach tree would have fared if there had been several horseradish plants in its shade

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Anne Miller

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Planting rosemary or french marigolds in various spots might ward off the grasshoppers.

Where I live we don't have normal grasshopper so I just smash any that I see.

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David Nightingale

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Location: Pierce County WA, Northwest and Sound

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Monocultures are big producers, and big targets for predation. Even if they’re not yours, but next door, or even just near by. I keep Starlings colonies and leave tall grass 1/2 acre plots untouched every other year, ie the Fallow system. The birds clean up all over populating insects and break pest cycles. I use BTU for tent caterpillars in the orchard, but caterpillars and recently grasshoppers are all over. As long as I don’t cultivate large areas every year, I have no insect over population so far. Cheers

Joao Winckler

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Interesting that they left your chard alone. I had a similar experience, they completely ignored anything in the allium family and most brassicas but absolutely hammered my sunflowers and squash leaves. The guinea fowl idea is solid if you have the space for them. A neighbour of mine runs a small flock and his grasshopper problem basically disappeared within two seasons. They patrol constantly and eat an insane amount of insects.

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Chance Lunceford

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posted 1 week ago

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Here's what they love at my house:

Honeysuckle
Some kale, but not others (they'll eat some of my perennial kale to the stem but not touch the plant literally touching the one they love)
Hollyhock
Some salvia but not others
Pretty much any damaged or weakened plant
Some sunflowers but not others

They never touch:

Lilacs
Serviceberry
Most tree leaves (some fruit tree leaves get mildly munched)
Lots of other stuff

We have "bad years" here most years, but I did the research and it's a lot of fertility they're leaving behind throughout the season via their waste and their bodies are, as has been mentioned, excellent fertilizer and it is a "slow release formula."

If they get obnoxious, I make run a pass of diatomaceous and it'll bring things back into balance for awhile.

Thekla McDaniels

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Ah! Diatomaceous earth. That might help, and I already have a bag.

How is it most effectively applied?

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Thekla McDaniels

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Chance Lunceford wrote:

We have "bad years" here most years, but I did the research and it's a lot of fertility they're leaving behind throughout the season via their waste and their bodies are, as has been mentioned, excellent fertilizer and it is a "slow release formula."

That’s encouraging, that all the plant material that gets chomped up by grasshoppers becomes essentially precompost, pulverized with enzymes and microbes added!

The’ve eaten huge volumes of plants here. Last year they ate the leaves off the mature crabapple and aspen trees.

This year I planted hollyhocks, lots and lots, and had great germination. But there are hardly any seedlings left, but all the vanished plant material is still here as soil amendment!

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Chance Lunceford

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posted 1 week ago

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Thekla McDaniels wrote:Ah! Diatomaceous earth. That might help, and I already have a bag.

How is it most effectively applied?

I've had best results with the following three methods;

1) Mixed into water and sprayed through a backpack sprayer
- Pros: Even distribution, precise application, efficient
- Cons: You gotta keep annoyingly agitating the sprayer or it clogs, is a thin layer so isn't as fast as a thick layer of powder

2) With a puff/pump duster (in the screenshots)
- Pros: Easy, fast, can lay down lot or a little with skillful use
- Cons: Inconsistent, messy, inefficient

3) Flour Sifter
- Pros: Efficient, targeted, total control
- Cons: Slow, messy

Bonus: Make sure you cover your mouth with a bandana or gator or something, it can agitate your lungs.

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Screenshot_20260719-210411.png

C. Letellier

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Yeardly Arthur wrote:I've always wondered how one might turn the tables on grasshoppers and use them as fertilizer. During the 17-year cicada emergence in 2024, we had thousands of big, fat insects pop out of the ground all over our neighborhood. Every few days I would gather the husks in buckets for high-nitrogen mulch, and after a couple of weeks I could rake the spent bugs into piles and bury them in our garden plots. Best year for tomatoes EVER.

Back when Japanese beetles were first becoming a problem, a neighbor would let me empty his traps twice a day. I'd dump them by the pound in soapy water, wait a while and pour the soup around the veggies.

I hope we never have an infestation of grasshoppers, but if it happens I'll have to cycle back around to this thread and see what they like best to eat. Maybe they could be lured into big box traps and added to the compost pile...

Make great animal feed. Animals make fertilizer. bit indirect but works. The are a number of systems to harvest them in mass from various types of fields.

Now you can also use them as grasshopper repellent also. Capture, put in blender and mix roughly 1 cup of grasshoppers in a pint of water. Strain the nozzle plugging bits out and mix the liquid with about 2 gallons of water and spray on what you want to protect. Washes off if it rains but otherwise will last 4 days to a week and will repel the grasshoppers for that time.

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Susan Mené

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Interesting.
I have seen zero grasshoppers this year and did not even think of it until I saw this thread. Maybe our Long Island grasshoppers decided there was better "eats" elsewhere
I do hear the harmless katydids at night.

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Riona Abhainn

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posted 6 days ago

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My observation about grass hoppers is that they taste good in tacos as the meat! Nice and spicey. There's a restaurant about 40 min. away from me that has them.

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Yeardly Arthur

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I have a fantasy of building a grasshopper trap, in the event we encounter a population explosion here. Something like a Japanese beetle trap, say a wide, shallow cone of sheet metal funneling into a 5 gal bucket half full of soapy water. Add a few bait plants in the center, and...

(Okay, now I'm starting to feel a little like Wile E. Coyote. Maybe I should paint an ACME logo on the side of it.)

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Thekla McDaniels

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Hmmm,

I might be able to make that work… I don’t think the bait plants would work here, but if the sides of the cone were steep enough and the cone wide enough, the grasshoppers would slide down and in. I might catch the ones who had jumped randomly and can’t yet fly.

I could sell them to hungry people if the chickens were tired of them, or crush them for fertilizer

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M Ljin

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How would you prepare grasshoppers to eat, I wonder? When I was a child we took a net out and swept the meadows to look at insects.

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Yeardly Arthur

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M Ljin wrote:How would you prepare grasshoppers to eat, I wonder? When I was a child we took a net out and swept the meadows to look at insects.

Roast or deep fry. They're crunchy, tasty, and nutritious.

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Thekla McDaniels

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Yeardly Arthur wrote:

M Ljin wrote:How would you prepare grasshoppers to eat, I wonder? When I was a child we took a net out and swept the meadows to look at insects.

Roast or deep fry. They're crunchy, tasty, and nutritious.

Above post says they’re good in tacos.

Seems like you could fry and season as a crunchy snack.. they may contain enough fat that you don’t need to add any. “Grass” (or leaf and fruit) fed fat probably healthy stuff.

Or, something in sauce or gravy or vege stirfry. Something like saag panir could have grasshoppers added. You wouldn’t have to look at them, and if nuts or other crunchy element were added, the grasshopper would be further disguised.

The younger instars don’t have as hard an exoskeleton.

I would probably want to pull the legs off, and the wings if they have them. They are pretty much just chitin (about as nutritious as hair and fingernails .

There might be information and recipes on the web.

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Ben Brownell

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Not a notably bad year here for numbers, I rarely see them around (versus some years they are hopping everywhere) but they have demolished several chestnut seedlings so far. Not much at all that's green this time of year so any lush leaves are a beacon. I've tried visually screening some plants (also helps with shading from intense sun) and that may make them less of a target. Re: sunflowers, I have a small patch of sun chokes that got a few nibbles but mostly left alone so far. 2nd year pomegranate and black walnut are completely untouched.

Nancy Reading

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Official entomology thread here

I linked to a post that has a cooking suggestion for grasshoppers.....

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Thekla McDaniels

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Excellent thread, Nancy. Thanks for linking to it.

I am not tempted, although many people ate posting their enjoyment and various ways to cook.

I won’t compete with my chickens and guineas. But I bet i would if my life depended on it!

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Nancy Reading

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I think if you think of them as land shrimps the cultural aversion would be reduced. I think if they were eating my plants I'd certainly be tempted to reduce their population, I'd try it once at least!

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Tereza Okava

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I've eaten them and thought they were great. In landlocked parts of Japan back in the day they were an important source of protein.
That said, in my garden if I see one, I'm out there with my sharpest scissors and I chop those little jerks in two. Eating them is my last concern! (although one did fall in the rabbit run and a rabbt ate it, which was a surprise. Then again, my rabbit girls would eat anything that didn't eat them first....)

Steve Mendez

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We had a Mormon Cricket (They're actually grasshoppers) population boom in the desert and mountains of our area this year. I didn't hear of any problems with them in agricultural areas.
On a side by side trip in the mountains on July 3rd we came upon bands of them crossing the trail in several places. They covered the ground for several hundred feet at each crossing. They pile up on the vehicle tracks to eat the ones that have been run over; thus getting run over themselves. It was a gooey mess when the third side by side brought up the rear. This picture is from July 2022.

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Dennis Barrow

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Last year I mowed a ten foot swath around my gardens. Didn't stop the hoppers. This year I mowed 100 foot swath. Really has helped keep them down, Not completely but a noticeable difference from last year. It really helps keeping the grass and weeds cut down.
Last year I found the hoppers really liked my potato leaves, had to put row covers over them.
And of course I can sit all day watching my chickens chase them around!

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