Side Story -- The Grasshopper

 I’d like to share an amusing side story with you while waiting for my post on the outdoor garden experience this year.  

I’ve dealt with bugs in the past getting into the garden. I’ve had horrible outbreaks of spider mites on the plumeria. I tried all the remedies from dish soap to neem oil attempting to rid myself of those pests. And of course the normal critters that come with gardening – ants, gnats, and fruit flies.

I thought I could handle bugs. Then I moved to Texas. The North never faced off against bugs like you guys get down South. Between the heat, the long growing season, and the mild winters, bugs down in Texas never stop growing. I would honestly not be surprised if a man-sized mosquito knocked on my door right now and asked if I’d like to make a blood donation. (My skin is itching already joking about it!)

But the thing that really got under my skin this year was the massive, arrogant grasshoppers.

Up North a large grasshopper is about the length and width of an adult sized pinky finger. The grasshopper that invade my porch and ate about a pound of foliage and flowers was the length of a full grown man’s index finger and as thick as his thumb.

I could be sitting in my chair inside my house, 20 feet across my living room, out my backdoor, and see this BEAST gnawing away at leaves clear as day. I honestly thought at first it was a lizard crawling on the plant due to its massive size!

I tried spraying the leaves with no luck and only managed to scare away the leopard geckos that I want to keep around my plants. This huge grasshopper shrugged off me trying to drown him, flicking him across the lawn, and general terrorizing him into leaving.

Nothing was working and I was starting to talk crazy to my husband about this maddening situation.

That was until my next door neighbor, a Texas native, told me to pour hot sauce on the grasshopper. Now I thought this was some folksy Southern advice that would probably never work but I was getting desperate. As well, he was very confident about hot sauce driving away this buggy bastard.

The next day I saw the grasshopper on the plants again and he had chewed a whole straight though a brand new growth on my plumeria and my crab claws.

 In a rage, I grabbed a bottle of Tabasco sauce and ran outside fling hot sauce all over the grasshopper, the plant, the porch, and myself.

It looked like a taco truck had exploded on my back porch by the time I had stopped. The grasshopper had turned tail and run as soon as I had nailed him with a blast of hot sauce. He lingered in the grass about 4 feet from my porch and I was able to grab this picture of him. Sadly, there’s no real way to get perspective on his size from the photo but trust me this guy was a locus!

Moral of the story, he has not returned since the day of the hot sauce (and killed a whole stalk of the crab claw) and I now keep a bottle of hot sauce in my gardening basket.