An infestation that would make a good horror flick

On our walk around the neighborhood one night Madison pointed out the telephone pole in our neighbor's house that sits on the corner of our street. The neighbor's have moved to Atlanta and the house is empty. The pole sits between his house and his next door neighbor's house right next to his neighbor's palm tree. The pole was covered with grasshoppers.

Immediately I was grossed out. I'm not a creepy, crawly bug person what-so-ever. This was like something out of horror flick. I handed my phone to Madison and instructed she be the one to get close enough for a photo because hey, this is a blog entry.

As we stood examining the pole, Madison discovered that the palm tree next to the pole was covered with thousands of the grasshoppers chowing down. There was not one branch or leaf that didn't have a grasshopper on it. Then we noticed (and you can see from the above picture) that the hoppers were on this neighbor's house! They were on the corner of the house and as we walked around to the front of his house we noticed them on the wall outside his front door.

Another neighbor noticed us looking and he came over to inquire as to what we were doing. He is a commercial lawn service owner and even he was stumped. He shook them off of the wire that was attached to the pole, but he had no solution to the problem. I reminded him that he was closer to the house than I was and that his wife was facebook friends with the neighbor and maybe she should give a shout out to them. Because frankly, if I was looking at buying a house that house right there would not be one I would even enter!

A couple of days after that Kelly discovered the same problem on the palm tree outside of her rental house. What had once been a nice palm tree was now half gone by grasshoppers. I turned to the Internet to solve the problem. I investigated first infestation of grasshoppers and learned that this is a growing problem in rural America. These little buggers are everywhere feasting on gardens and trees and bushes. Once they become adults they are very hard to get rid of as pesticides don't seem to touch them. Here are the solutions for infestation of grasshoppers:

1. Kill them with a shoe.
2. Keep chickens
3. Sprinkle all purpose flour over the tree in the dawn so that it sticks to the dew. The flour will gum up the grasshoppers mouth and cause them to not be able to eat.

We decided Kelly should go with solution #3 although I did like the idea of solution #2. She vetoed that solution because she currently has a litter of feral kittens living under her house and she didn't think the chickens would survive. 

I relayed this to my commercial lawn service neighbor the next morning when I was walking Elliot and I discovered that the grasshoppers were no longer on the house. I asked him if he had sprayed them. He told me had used his flip flop. I thought he was joking. He said no that he had found a grasshopper in his garage and realized I was right about him being closer to the infestation than anyone else so he went up to the house, removed his flip flop and smashed one.  I told him that was one of the more effective ways to get rid of them. We discussed the various ways and then he told me that he didn't recommend #1 as it was a nasty job. He said that smashing them resulted in a squirting of nasty, green goo. I told him to get some chickens for his yard.

Kelly tried the flour method and texted me that it didn't seem to be fazing the grasshoppers any. I texted perhaps she should also try the chickens despite the cat family living under her house. I reminded her that if she had chickens hunting the grasshoppers the cat family would have an opportunity to hunt the chickens and Kelly wouldn't have to worry about the insects or keeping the nursing mother fed.

Kelly: Ah, the circle of life.

As of now the grasshoppers are still at the top of the food chain. We are looking into the chicken situation. I know someone...