What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Epic Gardening

podcast. My name's Kevin. Today we're talking about some annoying pests and

these are grasshoppers. So there's really nothing worse to the point where there are one of the

plagues in the Bible. They're a pretty annoying pest all the way back to a couple thousand

years ago. So you've cultivated an amazing garden. You've got greens, veggies, and

grasshoppers come and just destroy it. So how do we get rid of these guys and

how do we prevent them from even coming in the first place?

Let's start with some facts about grasshoppers.

First of all, they eat around half of their weight every day.

So no matter where they are in their life cycle, they will chew away at leaves and stems of plants in your garden at up to about 50% of their own body weight, which is insane.

Adult grasshoppers, they're about one to two inches long, anywhere from a brown to a

reddish yellow or a green, and it is really crazy how few you need to decimate a crop.

So 10 adults per square yard will destroy

range land.

Smaller numbers than that can even destroy your garden.

You can have a couple in your garden if it's a small raised bed and it will seriously harm the produce there.

Now what is the life cycle of a grasshopper? Only in understanding the life cycle of a pest can we understand how they replicate

what they need to survive so we can do what we can to counter that, right? So here we go. They lay

their eggs at the end of the summer. They bury them in the soil in pods.

The eggs lay in the soil throughout winter going into diapause and then they hatch in early spring.

As soon as they hatch the grasshopper nymphs immediately start to eat anything that is near them.

And as they grow, they start to exhaust what's near them and then they move to new areas of the garden.

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