It looks great, Larry!

Did all this rain miss y'all? Your ground looks kinda dry.

Dawn

Dawn, we got rain, if I counted correctly it was 37 drops. I sure hope we do get rain, its dry as a bone here. I had to water before I tilled to keep the dust down.

Larry

That's funny. It's how we usually measure rain here, in drops.
kim

We measure it in the distance between drops. When someone says they had a 6 inch rain they mean that it was 6 inches between drops. LOL

lol lol lol

It is everyone's great sense of humor that keeps all of us going through the long, hot, dry summers!

I hope those of you who haven't had rain last week and this week will get some substantial rain (more than 37 drops) soon. It is amazing how much greener everything is today.

The sky is beautiful today. It has all sorts of white and gray puffy clouds floating around in it. One of the things I miss most during prolonged drought is the clouds. While a blue sky is lovely, a blue sky totally devoid of substantial clouds for weeks on end is just another symptom of drought.

My garden is just chock-full of deliriously happy bees, butterflies and other insects (good and bad) today. They're loving having some moisture and humidity again. I don't like the humidity as much as they do, but the alternative is painfully dry air which isn't much fun either.

Down here at my end of the state, this feels like a normal summer---about the same as 2004 or 2002. I hope the more or less normal summer continues.

Looking good Larry. Thanks! We are a bit dry up here, though better than last year. But still, there are too many grasshoppers to plant and get away with it. I vacuumed another 3 gallons of them this morning before running out of time and heading for work. I bet I could have easily vacuumed 9 gallons, if I had all the time I wanted.

George

That is just crazy, George. I have had years where the grasshoppers ate tree bark, all the leaves and fruit off the trees, the window screens, cotton rugs on the porch, etc. and I still don't think I could have vacuumed up 3 gallons of them, much less 9 gallons, on any given day.

I've been to grassfires and wildfires, though, where I've see an increasingly large number of them jumping and flying ahead of the fire, and landing in still-green areas ahead of the fire, and in that sort of circumstance there might have been as many as you're seeing there.

I wonder what in the world is going on with birds and other natural predators that they cannot seem to get a handle on helping control the hoppers.

Dawn

The grasshoppers are starting to move in here also. I thought that they may be a lot of them move back into the pasture after the new grass started growing, but the rains have been missing us and the hoppers think my garden looks better every day.

Like a fool, I tiller up another bed today. It is where I have a mulch pile for two years and looks like it will be a good bed. It is only about 120 sq. ft.

Larry

Larry, I am seeing more and more hoppers every day, especially in the new back garden which has native grassland on all 4 sides of it. I knew they'd be an issue in that back garden at some point. So far, they're only eating okra leaves.

I always get sharply increasing numbers of grasshoppers from mid-July through mid-August no matter the weather or the type of year it is....in a bad grasshopper year I might see more, but even in a good year when their population is relatively low, I still have a lot more of them than we ever had in the city.

I still have lots of native birds all over the place. Usually when I walk out of the house and head to the garden, birds fly up out of the garden like crazy. After I've been in the garden a few minutes and they are used to my presence, some of them come back to the garden, while others just sit on the power lines or on top of the fence and wait for me to leave.

I can only assume they are eating grasshoppers or something when they are in the garden. I always have a good bird population around, but this year it is incredibly high, so maybe that's because there's a lot of bugs to eat.

Dawn

Knock on wood still very few hoppers around here. Although I've had a few thrips, ect not near as many as usual. Last weekend I read where due to the continued drought that the areas of AZ & NM where they overwinter and then migrate this way had decreased the numbers greatly in those area which they contribute to the lower amount of TSWV and other insect borne diseases this year not only in our area but CO, the Texas Panhandle and Norhtern NM. I found my first hornworm Sunday. Have found two since. Later than normal for the fist one. Hopefully that means I won't have as many as I did 2 & 3 years ago. Again George it is hard for me to even envision the amount of hoppers you are seeing. Jay