Anybody that has known us for a while, is generally aware that there is a grasshopper horde that plagues us every summer.  The grasshoppers are so thick that they jump up as we walk outside, and when they land, it sounds like rain.  While we do have some of the non-breeding Java chickens roaming in the garden for grasshopper control, we still have plenty of grasshoppers to spare.  And then some.  When walking outside and getting literally covered in grasshoppers, it is almost impossible not to think of various Bible stories involving locust plagues.

I was really getting frustrated with the windows on the back of the house being covered in so many grasshoppers that you could hardly see out.  GROSS!  While discussing the grasshopper plague, my friend Laurie up in Maine gave me an idea – get a shop vac and VACUUM THE GRASSHOPPERS and feed them to the chickens!

Upon mentioning this to the hubby, he dug around in the garage and found the small portable shop vac we have.  He promptly proceeded to the back of the house where the hoppers were congregating.  It took a bit to be able to get the rhythm down to sneak up on the hoppers and suck them up before they jumped away.  But he figured it out and was soon divesting our poor house of its obnoxious, annoying, disgusting, abhorrent hopper horde.

In the end, an estimated hundreds of grasshoppers were sucked up and then deposited into a chicken run.  At first, the chickens were really freaking out and didn’t know what to do with a huge pile of sluggish (dying) grasshoppers.  But after their initial alarm wore off – those chickens had a feast and went to bed that night with very full crops.

Moral of the story: If you find yourself with disgusting things like hordes of grasshoppers or maybe crickets, don’t underestimate the power of the lowly vacuum in your pest control plan!