Grasshoppers on my mint!

I planted a moderately grown mint plant, from a punnet sold from my local nursery, in one of my back gardens the other week. I bought it because the mint plant that I have in a different garden bed at the front of the house, has been in for about six months now and is at least growing, but is becoming a little straggly and seems to have a lot more stem and diminished leaf growth. So I thought a second plant would just help to keep our supply up!

But alas, the back garden plant, the new one, has succumbed significantly to a blight of tiny green grasshoppers. They are everywhere. The plant leaves looks skeletal! I mean all it has left is literally the veins in the leaf and the main stems. I hardly recognised it as the mint plant I put in only a few weeks back! Terrible news.

People talk of controlling grasshoppers by just going around squishing the things and I have generally done this. But goodness, I wouldn't know where to begin and the grasshoppers that are on this plant in the hundreds (probably) are tiny. They are nymphs (babies) and each one would be less than half a centimetre in length.

I think sadly due to the extent of damage this plant has received, it is a lost cause. But certainly interesting to observe where plants do and don't do so well in your garden and apparently this garden bed isn't great for mint. I suspect the soil nutrients in the garden bed I planted the mint in weren't up to the task, due to my lack of preparation to the soil and my "I'll just chuck it in and see how it goes" mentality at the moment.

Anyway, good learning curve and see how the rest of the plants in that bed deal with the next door neighbour's "pest" problem and whether any of them succumb or whether the mint will take one for the team and the grasshoppers will move somewhere else once they finish on my mint plant. Pin It