We have been planting sunflowers for the last couple of years and the birds love them.  Of course, they may not be the only ones eating them.

Aggie and Craig Hundley sent me a couple of pictures showing their thief. 

I love the acrobatics!  Some days I wish I could do that.  I’m not sure what I would do with it, but it sure would come in handy some day if there is some chocolate on the bottom of something hanging in my house!

Dig it!

Posted under General, Humor / Fun

For the past several weeks Monarch caterpillars have been eating all of our Butterfly Weed.  I have gone outside every day and checked on their progress.  I saw some that were no more than a quarter of an inch long and others that were two inches long.  I love watching them chew away at the edge of a leaf that keeps getting shorter and shorter.  At some point, though, they have to go to their next phase of life, the chrysalis.  No problem.  With that many caterpillars I should be seeing them everywhere.  I looked in the plants around the Butterfly Weeds.  Nothing.  I looked in the birch trees.  Nothing.  Hmmm.  Where are they?

The other day while wandering around looking at the garden and thinking of what needs to be done and what we want to do next year, I noticed that the strawberries were producing again and were ready to eat.

 

I bent over, picked one off and as I was popping it in my mouth, I saw it!

 

Actually, I saw two.

 

And a caterpillar getting ready to change.

 

 

They were all on the underside of our “fence”.

I ran inside to get the camera and found the third chrysalis when I was getting pictures of the other two.

 

The next day, the caterpillar was hanging in position to change, but I missed the actual change. 

I had checked in the afternoon when I got home and he was still hanging there.  About three hours later after Dwayne had gotten home, he was a chrysalis. 

 

I’m excited to see them emerge, but I will have to time it just right. 

I’m just happy that we are home to such a wonderful natural phenomena.  Dwayne has been wanting to get a piece of log from the Coralville Reservoir.  Not only would that be a fine addition to the garden… it’s a potential home to more butterfly chrysalis!

Dig it!

Posted under General, Photos

While taking pictures of the plants that I had just planted (from the previous post), I happened to spot this:

 

It took me awhile to find it, but I took my own advice and looked at the Bug Guide.  Actually, I found it on the Bug Guide by doing a Google search and found this: click here.  It turns out this is a Brown Hooded Owlet Moth caterpillar.  That is the species Cucullia convexipennis.  Pretty impressive. 

We have lots of Monarch caterpillars this year, but I still haven’t seen any Swallowtail caterpillars.  And we planted Parsley just for them.  How ungrateful!  I’m still hoping…although we seem to be running out of time.

Dig it!

Posted under General, Photos

About a week ago the phone rang.  It was one of Dwayne’s co-workers and he was at a seasonal garden center that was clearing house.  Did we want some free annuals?  Free plants????  I can be there in 15 minutes!!!

It took me about 25 since I had to follow the speed limit, but they still had plenty of plants left.  And it turned out you had to buy something before you could get the free annuals.  I was not upset, though.  All of their four inch pots were a dollar and their six inch pots were only two dollars.  I spent 35 dollars and came home with 96 plants. 

I went back the next day and got eleven more plants.  And a pot that they had marked down 40 percent.  It would work well for some of the plants I got the day before that needed to be wet.  The pot didn’t have any holes, so the swamp plants would like it just fine.  I also got a couple more plants that could go in said pot that day.

 

Aaaaannnnd… I went back the third day and got even more plants.  All said, I ended up with about 170 plants and only spent about $70.  The seventy dollars was spent on the perennial plants that I hope come back next spring. 

 Of course, once you get 170 plants home you realize that you have to put them in the ground.  And soon.  Hmmm.  Maybe I should have thought of that a little more before I went crazy with the unbelievable sale.  Oh, well.  Down to business. 

Fortunately, we have a large area that has just been stripped of grass and needs to have something to hold the dirt down… and make it look a lot better.  And it will provide some color for the late summer and early fall.

 

Then I started figuring out where to put all of the perennials.  I got some of them for the express purpose of putting around the tree in the front yard when we finish the edging.  Of course, that may involve having it raised on one side, so we will probably have someone do it for us.  Neither of us have the patience for it. Since I can’t put those plants where I want them, yet, and I don’t know when the job will be done, I put them in the raised vegetable bed.  We lost a lot of our peppers to a stem rot in June and have a big open space.  The plants fit perfectly.  And with the roots out of the pots, they should be able to perk up a bit.

 

Now.  Where to put the other several dozen?  I put about 15 on the hill.

I managed to find white monarda (or bee balm) on my second trip so I bought all of them.  I had some white ones when we first started the garden (we had white, pink and purple monarda), but the white didn’t come back on the third year.  I don’t know if it is a weak color with the darker ones taking over, but I haven’t been able to find any white since then.  So I pounced!  I now have five new white monarda!  

I planted a couple of my new purchases on the north side of our house.

 

And I still have more.  Where am I going to put these?  Ugh.

I planted the rest of them this morning, mainly in the main garden although a couple of them will look good on the north side of the house.

Since I have so many of the new plants and I don’t want to miss them when I water them, I left the tags with the plants.  I usually take the tag, clean them up and put them in my garden book.  That way I can keep track of what I have in the garden a little better.  I also have a smaller book that I write everything in.  I call it my garden diary.  I put the date down and what happened.  Whether it was the chickadee that showed up at the feeder this morning, the grackles showing up again or where I put all my new flowers I put it in the book. 

The diary helps when I have a bare spot and can’t remember if nothing was there, something was there but died, or if there are bulbs in the spot.  It especially helps in the spring when something starts growing and I can’t remember planting anything in that spot.  Of course, next year, I’ll have a lot of new things popping up.  As a matter of fact about 70!  I am going to be positive that everything will grow next year!

Dig it!

Posted under General, Photos

Dangerous words from two people with very little design ability.  Or patience.

We have been talking about getting some edging around our house for awhile now.  We even had a landscaper come out this past spring and he showed us how to use a hose to outline what you want to cut out before you actually cut out the turf.  And he gave us an estimate for the labor and the cost of the edging material.  So we have been thinking about how we can afford it.  And… here comes one of Dwayne’s visions.

Dwayne has access to some sandstone rock at work.  Great.  Free rock.  We just have to get it ourselves.  Actually, my wonderful husband gets all of that fun to himself!  Dwayne pulled our hose out of the reel and we started at one end of the house, figured out where we wanted the line to be and then sprayed along it with marker paint.  when we hit the end, we moved the hose to the next section and did the same.  All the way around the house.  And we decided to make a flower bed around our Purple Mountain Ash.  So we marked that out, too.  Next, we have to strip the sod.  Neither of us have ever done anything like that before.  Well, that hasn’t stopped us in the past, so Dwayne rented a sod stripper last week and set to work. 

It looked pretty rough.  Especially around the tree.

After a lot of pulling up the sod and raking what is left, we started laying the rock that we have already. 

So far, so good.  We will need a lot more rock before we are finished, but Dwayne is doing a great job in getting it to look good.  Especially where the lawn slopes. 

And with landscape fabric and mulch to keep the weeds down, it is going to look really nice. 

We will put in some larger stones for a path from the patio to the yard.

Dwayne took the best looking sod and replaced some not-so-good-looking sod along our driveway.

While Dwayne has done most of the work (and doing a great job at it, too!), the cat’s apparently worked so hard supervising that they needed to rest.

Here’s to a relatively painless finish to what we have started!

 

Dig it!

Posted under General, Photos

The last several days I have been going out to my Sven rose

 

and picking off Japanese Beetles.  Every time I go out there, I pick at least one off.  And, happily, squish it.  As I was doing that this morning, I was also looking at my Butterfly Weed (it sits right next to the rose bush) and did my daily head count of our Monarch caterpillars.  It changes every day, but there were at least five there this morning.

 

 

After I walked away and went to work on something else, I got to thinking….  why do I want to kill something that is eating my plants:

 

and, yet, I let something that is eating my plants live? 

And I’m excited about having them eat my plants to the ground!

 

It sounds like something isn’t quite right in my reasoning.  Of course, any gardener will agree that Japanese Beetles just eat to eat.  They don’t do anything magical like going from a very small caterpillar to a large caterpillar to a chrysalis to a beautiful butterfly… all within the space of a few weeks.   And that takes energy, so they have to eat something, right?

 

The “nurseries” for my Monarch caterpillars are also home to aphids this year. 

 

And there are a lot of them.  Unfortunately, I don’t want to spray them with anything because they are on the same plant as the caterpillars… and sometimes on the same leaf. 

 

I guess I will just have to hope that the lady bugs show up soon to take care of my nursery!

 

Dig it!

Posted under General, Photos