Those pesky grasshoppers… and what to do with them


I wondered if it was more a rural affair, but my town gardening friends tell me they are having problems with those pesky grasshoppers too. They are eating my seedlings and greens down to the ground and I’m not impressed!

I thought my chooks would be doing a better job of keeping the population under control, to be honest, but they seem to be too busy scratching through the neighbours’ cow manure to deal with my grasshopper glut. Though they love them if they come across them, they haven’t reached the point of hunting through my paddocks for them.

So I hit up my friend Google and found some information and advice. The information here in Australia is that the eggs will overwinter in the ground so you need to spray to kill the grasshoppers to break the cycle. I don’t like that idea, so I looked for a few others to reduce the population.

Grasshopper traps on the internet ranged from fluffy blankets (their legs get stuck) to yellow things (which apparently attract them) to soft-drink-bottle grass traps, to my current favourite, a molasses bath trap! So far I haven’t caught anything in the soft-drink-bottle traps, but the big container of water and molasses (a mix of 10:1) is going great guns! I set out one big shallow container of it yesterday afternoon, and collected 9 grasshoppers from it this morning. I fed them to my Mama hen with 11 babies and she was sure pleased!

One bonus bit of information I found along the way is that Praying Mantis eat grasshoppers… they’re apparently their only insect predator. So if you see a Praying Mantis, thank him and leave him be :) 

I have yet to try the fluffy blanket trick, I might give it a go. But my advice for now is to try the molasses trap. I would think you could do the same thing with some honey or sugar water and a sprinkle of dried yeast. Let me know how you go?

 (I'm also considering farming some grasshoppers or other insects- or convincing my kids to!- to supplement my chooks' diet. Will keep you posted!)


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