I witnessed the weirdest thing today. I was standing in the garden watching a butterfly float around the flowers when something streaked past my head, hit the butterfly and went down into the shrubbery. I couldn’t figure out what it was.
When I went and looked for it, it turned out to be two monarch butterflies locked together. I gently pried them apart and threw them in different directions. Now I know that butterflies are territorial, but this took aggression to a whole new level.
There are lots of caterpillars right now.
Big ones
Small ones
And ones so tiny I have a hard time holding the phone still enough to get a decent picture. All of the passion flower vines are ragged and the butterflies are ragged from fighting over territory.
Casper and I go out in the mornings when it’s still cool and the onshore breeze is blowing. Usually I’m outside about 3 minutes before I see something that needs to be done. Taking Casper out is just the motivation I need to get me moving on the yard work. I sit down and read between chores and he sits by my chair and watches the butterflies. After a dirt bath.
I was sitting on the patio, taking advantage of the wonderful weather we were having, when I looked at the passion flower vine and thought that it looked a little spiky. I got up to take a closer look and found that it wasn’t the vine that was spiky. This one vine had six gulf fritillary larvae on it.
After the drought and the severe cutbacks in landscape watering the bugs finally have something to eat again and if the number of caterpillars in my yard are any indication, it’s going to be a banner year for butterflies.
Went a little nuts this weekend. It was the first weekend since before Thanksgiving where it was both sunny and I didn’t have anything else that needed doing, so I spent quite a bit of time outside.
I tend to buy plants and hang onto them for a while before planting. I’m waiting for better weather or trying to come up with the perfect spot for a particular plant. I end up with up with a lot things in plant limbo; waiting for permanent homes. With the break in the rain I decided to just do it. Stop ruminating and get on with it.
I’ve been collecting succulents with interesting foliage colors for the past year, trying to get some color in the yard even when nothing is blooming. Crassula campfire is going to have a big part in the garden. It’s colors are so vivid I ended up getting several plants. I bought some at the local nursery that were very overgrown for the pot they were in. While they weren’t very pretty the way they were, I was able to cut them back and use the cut stems for more starts.
I took advantage of the sun and the extra day off and got almost all of my plants-in-waiting planted. I wandered around the yard deciding what I wanted to put where and when I made a decision grabbed my Japanese gardening knife, dug a hole and planted. The plants I managed to get into the ground before Thanksgiving encouraged me. They’ve more than doubled in size since I planted them. With all the rain we’ve gotten and are continuing to get, there isn’t going to be a better time to plant. Things will have time to develop a good root system before the heat of summer comes along to challenge them.
I spent a lot of time pulling up hardy geranium seedlings in the front yard. Until this year it had been fairly well behaved. It had come up from seed in a few places, but it was pretty easy to get rid of if it showed up someplace I didn’t want it. This year it’s coming up everywhere. It would smother everything if I let it. I’m not nearly done trying to tame it, but at least I cleared enough space for a few other things.
As I worked around the yard I noticed that I have a positive infestation of monarch larvae.
I’m delighted. These guys are the reason I let the butterfly weed grow where ever it pops up.
My garden has looked a little chewed up this year.
I’m thinking it may be a secondary effect of the way California is handling the drought. A set of unintended consequences. Let’s face it. The ecosystem in Southern California depend in large part to the things people do. People have just stopped watering in many places. Little pieces of land all over have gone from grass and plants to just dirt. This does more than just save water. It also takes one of the few sources of clean, fresh water away from wildlife. Dry dirt supports very little. While I agree that a lawn isn’t a very efficient use of resources, going from green to barren in the space of year has had an impact. No greenery for the bugs to eat, no bugs for the birds to eat, etc.
So where ever there is any green, the bugs and birds are out in force. Desperate for the resources they need to survive. The leafcutter bees have pretty much denuded my bougainvillea, cutting both leaves and bracts. I saw one flying away with a piece of the bract once. Tiny bee flying away with a big piece of leaf, a practically fluorescent pink in the afternoon sun. I was practically dancing as it flew by. I get excited about the strangest stuff.
Goldfinches have been eating the leaves on my sunflowers. It doesn’t look very attractive, but the plants seem to withstand it OK and I read that the finches eat the leaves to feed to their babies so I’m OK with it. I can live with scroungy-looking sunflowers if I can feed the next generation of goldfinches with them.
My cosmos have been pretty ragged, too. Any time I water I disturb two or three moths, most likely laying eggs judging by the number of partially eaten petals on my flowers. I ran into the culprit below while gathering seed.
And the milkweed has had almost all of its leaves eaten, just bare stems the orange and red flowers left at the top. I hope that that means we’re going to have a good crop of monarchs this year.
While having an immaculate garden sounds wonderful, but I don’t know how realistic it is. I’d rather have less than perfect and have the birds and the bugs. My little oasis in what is becoming more and more of a desert.
I have a friend who wants believe in magic. She believes in angels and fairies and higher powers. She wants to believe that somewhere there is a magic pill-drink-bee pollen-kale kind of something that will cure cancer and cause her to finally lose weight. She very determinedly wants to believe in the invisible, unknowable and immeasurable.
I didn’t think about it very much until one afternoon when we had more hummingbirds than usual because I had just refilled the feeders. And I said “Who needs fairies? Hummingbirds are magical enough for me!” My friend gave the look of death. I forgot she had a fairy tattooed on her shoulder.
I didn’t feel too bad though. Fairies are superfluous in a garden that has hummingbirds. And butterflies, don’t let me forget the butterflies, those flying flowers.
I don’t know why anyone looks for more magic than they find in their own yards.
Blog of a geek with a garden 