Outsmarting the Enemy!

I don't generally have enemies. I'm a pretty easy going sort,
even when it comes to my garden. 

I like to share. After all sharing is caring...

But there's no sharing with grasshoppers.

Nibble nibble..

So here are a bunch of pictures in no particular order
and I'll tell you of my dilemma as we go.

You see, I have this incredible family and they indulge me quite often. The garden continues to grow and they help me to do crazy things like  plant seeds by the moonlight and construct things out of old rusted wire and help me haul heavy buckets of rotting manure all over the yard and the list goes on.

This fine gentleman, my son, Johnny asked for sunflowers this year. 

He loves to roast them himself, so he was really looking forward to this giant row of sunflowers. 

We've babied these things and he's really been a huge help.

 

Here's the enemy! There must be tens of thousands of them on our property. We have a wire fence around the garden to fend off the deer but it provides no protection from these voracious little suckers! We live on twenty nine acres of grass land and there's no stomping these guys and winning the battle. You hand pick all day and they still come by the bizillions. Two years in a row now we've fought these nasty devils. The cabbage is shredded, the potatoes are un-recognizeable, flowers have no petals, they even ate the poisonous plants! My foxglove is teeming with them. So many you can hear the clicking noise as they eat.

It's heartbreaking to plant so much and have so very little to show for it at the dinner table. Greenbeans, not even enough to put away seed for next year and none for the table. Peas, two small bowls full and then eaten to the ground. There's one squash vine still trying out of 10 plants. Every last baby's breath eaten to sticks, broccoli leaves look like lace. My hydrangea has like 1 leaf left.
There's a plague in my garden.
It's horrifying.

So Johnny and I put our heads together and we think we've come up with a plan.
Turkeys!
We'll build a fence around the fence that surrounds the garden
and ring the garden with hungry birds.

Come winter time, we'll eat the Turkeys that eat the grasshoppers
and finally have a harvest!
That's the general idea anyway.

Thanks Johnny, for taking pictures up high where I can't see or reach with the camera,
to show me that some things, up very high in the air have survived the hungry beasts.
Better luck next year perhaps, if we devise a perfect evil plan...

Any and all crazy suggestions are muchly appreciated!