Holy Freaking Grasshoppers Batman!!!!!

WOW!!! My husband called me at work on Tuesday and told me there were so many grasshoppers that he couldn't even get in the door. I thought he was exaggerating because I hadn't even seen one grasshopper around yet this year, there couldn't possibly be so many in just a few hours that he couldn't even get inside... Whatever.

Ok, so was I ever wrong. There was no exaggeration at all!!! I was completly shocked when I arrived home and to my horror ~ I discovered he was right!! Here are some pics.

The

Garage

There were so many that I had to take the mail and sweep off the front door with it. The kids were standing back (they didn't want to get hit with the grasshoppers I was throwing off ~ go figure) and Brycen was trying to stomp on as many as he could. I finally got the door cleaned off but I had forgotten to unlock it first. By the time I had it ready to open, I had to sweep it again. Once it was clean and I opened it, the kids ran in as fast as they could go and we checked the landing for grasshoppers. My kids are pretty rockin because none of the critters got into the house! Thank goodness for that!

Here is the fence inbetween our house and our neighbors house. They are just crawling everywhere!!!

This is my window well in the basement. We keep our chairs in here so they don't blow away (we are famous for having strong winds!!). They are all over the chairs as well as the screen. YUCK!

My boys thought it would be really funny to tease their sister. They kept telling her that the grasshoppers would come through the window and that they would eat her while she was sleeping. They said that they would be hopping all over her bed and her room and she wouldn't be able to get away from them. She was all worked up & in tears about it. I had to explain a couple of different times that grasshoppers don't eat people before she would calm down. Boys, Boys, Boys... :)

I made a ton of phone calls trying to figure out what we can do about controlling our infestation. Here is what I found out. The field behind our house will be sprayed by the county on the 10th. The USU Extension guy told me that we shouldn't worry about spraying until then since it won't do us much good anyway. He recommended Malathion.

I went to IFA and they have it for a pretty good price. The guy there handed it to me immediately upon hearing the word grasshoppers. He says it's really good and it's best to get them while they are still little. I talked to a guy who sprays all the time and he recommended concentrating on the areas that have the most bugs. He said it's not how much you spray but where you spray. He recommended spraying the house from the ground up to two feet all the way around. Also, he said to spray a barrier of 2 feet around the perimeter of the yard.

We bought this powder stuff too. It was for the grasshoppers but Bryan said it worked great on the crickets we had. We knew that we had at least two of them in the crack in the sidewalk but we had no idea how huge they were! It didn't even take 10 minutes after dropping that powder down the crack and those little buggers were up on the driveway walking in circles. Bryan said there were three mondo huge suckers that were holed up down there. I'm glad to get rid of those at least!

Now... if we could just get rid of the grasshoppers as easily...