Florida Gardening: NF Garden Brigade #15, 1 by JaxFlaGardener

JaxFlaGardener wrote:
Thanks for the new thread, Sandy. What is going on in my garden? -- the dern lubber grasshoppers are turning my plants into a gourmet smorgasbord! LOL I'm sorry to report they chewed up the Amaryllis 'Hercules' and 'Pepilio Elite' down to ground level. I moved all my Amaryllis to one small garden plot and intended to cover the bulbs with a wire mesh screen, but the lubbers seemed to reach the adult stage suddenly overnight. It only takes a few hours for a single lubber to turn an Amaryllis bulb into a gnawed up stump. The grasshoppers have also skeletonized my cut-leaf Philodendron (P. selloum) and are trying to ingest all my Crinum lilies. GRRR! I generally have a "live and let live" attitude toward all garden creatures, but I do declare a holy jihad on the lubbers every year, crushing them mercilessly with size 13 clodhoppers. The only comfort is that they will die off soon at the end of the yearly life cycle. I especially go after the "piggyback" lubbers to try to prevent any new generations, but a single mating pair can result in a few hundred lubbers. Every year, I think that I have killed them all when they are tiny, but some of them invariably escape. My main fear now is that, by selective breeding when I kill off only the slowest and least fit lubbers, that I will end up with a race of Uber-Lubbers that may fight back!! LOL

Jeremy