swallowtail caterpillar – will garden for cake

In the beginning of the spring, I was so hopeful that the garden would be producing enough vegetables to feed us for the year. Quite a few of the results are in and thanks to a cool, wet spring and a hot, humid summer (all above the norm), we would go hungry if the garden was our main source of vegetables. So many plants did not come close to expectations. Just about all of my squash plants rotted away from the moisture and the sole survivor has yet to produce a single squash that did not rot. Eggplants are struggling, barely producing and so are the peppers.

Having no choice but to remove my tacky string fence to keep out the deer, I have had to watch my 20 tomato plants get munched away. While they are still trying to set fruit, almost none of them have except for a few. The Gold Berries are one of the only plants producing fruit.

These are small cherry tomatoes, about an inch in diameter and they are a little on the tart side. The color is what I really love; that brown blush at the top, so unusual and so pretty!

The color develops as the fruit grows rather than as it ripens. In technical terms, the color is on the “shoulders” of the fruit. Whatever you prefer to call that area, the seeds are available from my favorite source of heirloom seeds, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

One of the only other plants with fruit is the Chocolate Pear. What happened to these fruits is a mystery.

Garlic chive blossoms are so delicate but beware, if you let them flower, they will reseed and you will have chives everywhere. Honeybees like them so I am leaving these flowers in place, yes, I like to live dangerously and I ain’t afraid of plucking plants…

While wandering the garden, I was surprised to find a Charentais melon. Unlike the squash plants, the melons in my front bed have been sprawling out. With any luck, we will get more than one.

Near the Charentais is another variety called Golden Crispy. Having never had one, I cannot tell you anything about it but we have several fruits on the vine and I will have to wait patiently for them to mature.

If you take a moment to look in all of the carrots and parsley, you will find swallowtail caterpillars. Lots of them actually, probably about two dozen or so out there now. We have a variety of swallowtail butterflies that visit the garden; zebra, tiger and spicebush swallowtails are abundant but these are zebra swallowtail caterpillars.

The biggest surprise of the day was spotting this monarch caterpillar on a swamp milkweed plant. In the two years we have been gardening out front and with all of the butterfly plants we have added, we have seen so few monarchs. Finding this caterpillar was like winning the lottery!

The abundant milkweed plants have also attracted this milkweed leaf beetle. They look a little like a monster sized ladybug and mainly eat the leaves of the plant.

This butterfly weed, which is a native variety of milkweed, has set seeds and will soon explode and release them into the wind.

One of my favorite plants, Ironweed. It too is a butterfly magnet, and I just love the color of the flowers. When we had our home in Nashville, I planted Ironweed on a slope in the yard and it spread by reseeding. With some luck, this will spread as well.

And another one of my favorites for attracting butterflies, Joe Pye Weed. If you have an area that gets a lot of moisture and would like to try a rain garden, Joe Pye Weed can tolerate moist soil, a win-win!

As the season progresses, I will be sure to share more from the garden, stay tuned!

You’ve heard the saying, life gives you lemons-make lemonade, or something like that. So we purchased six pullets, and when one turns out to be a rooster, you look for ways to make that lemonade thing work. And if you have looked closely at the photo above, you wonder just what I am talking about because that is obviously a photo of five hens and you are correct. Number 6, the rooster, is not in that photo, he is in the one below and a quick glance makes it pretty obvious.

No question which one he is. The hatchery guarantees an 85% accuracy rate on sexing them as they hatch. One in six, about 85% accurate. He had to go, especially since he had learned to crow. Last time we saw him, he was tucked under the arm of a nice older gentleman who had a large farm and a collection of roosters like ours that needed a new home because city folk cannot have roosters. He is surely enjoying the farm and his ability to free range the cotton fields.

It took us several tries and a few near misses to lure him into the cage for the long ride. He almost seemed to know that the jig was up.

For a 14 week old bird, he was pretty and I am a little disappointed that I will not see him with all of his adult feathers.

The garden in mid summer is teeming with surprises. Finding these little guys on my dill plant was exciting because we were hoping for some caterpillars. Although, they did eat most of the leaves and my dreams of homemade salad dressing were shelved until the next time I have a plant with leaves.

Society garlic is an ornamental plant and if it has flowers like this, it is welcome in my herb garden.

We have a lot of cucumber vines, not so many cukes but plenty of vines and on a stroll past one morning, I noticed a bumble bee tangled in the vines. Except that it wasn’t tangled in a vine, he was caught in the arms of a praying mantis and apparently, his breakfast. Such is the life in a garden and for all of you who did not know, a praying mantis will eat bugs of all kinds, good or bad which means that sometimes, the good bugs get eaten.

He did not seem to enjoy the photo shoot so I moved on…

Summer is salad season and in my garden, I have few greens to pick. From the top left, going clockwise; leaf lettuce, nasturtium leaf, lemon balm, parsley, beet greens, mallow-chima(an asian green) and colorful swiss chard.