🦗 Grasshopper
Various species
The locust's well-behaved cousin who still eats your garden like a buffet.
How to identify
Big jumping insects with powerful hind legs, 1–2 inches long, usually green or brown — you hear them before you see them. Nymphs look like mini adults without full wings and do most of the early-season damage.
Damage signs
Chews ragged holes in leaves, stems, and fruit; large numbers can defoliate entire beds in days. They prefer tender new growth and will strip seedlings to stems.
Non-chemical controls
- Cover high-value crops with floating row cover or insect netting during peak grasshopper season.
- Attract birds — install birdhouses, feeders, and water; a single brood of chicks eats thousands of grasshoppers.
- Apply Nosema locustae bait (a grasshopper-specific protozoan disease) early in the season when nymphs are small — it's biological and targets only grasshoppers.
- Till garden borders in fall to destroy egg pods laid in undisturbed soil.
- Plant trap crops of tall grass at the garden edge to intercept them before they reach vegetables.
- Handpick in the cool morning when they're sluggish, or shake plants over a sheet and collect the fallers.
Nerdy fact: A grasshopper's ears are on its abdomen — the big round panels on its sides are tympanal organs. It literally listens with its belly, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type.