Oceanic Wilderness

When I decided to dedicate one of my edible garden beds to flowers I was originally planning to make it half native and half zinnias or other flowers. That is what it is this year but I am planning to change that next year to an entirely native bed and move the zinnias to one of the side beds once they are finally built. But, I’m liking my idea for the year because the zinnias are so delightful and I am in awe of their beauty every time I go out to water the garden. My original inspiration for doing zinnias was in the gorgeous flowers that Cassiopeia Farm in…

It was a bit of a rocky start to tomato season and unseasonably hot temperatures in May thwarted a lot of the production but we are finally starting to harvest some tomatoes. So far they are all primarily Chris’ tomatoes that he ended up buying not long in the planting season after the ones he started from seed weren’t thriving. My tomatoes are doing well, a mix of ones I started from seed and others I supplemented with nursery grown plants, but I’m still a few weeks away from any appreciable harvest. And with summer temperatures and a lack of rain in the forecast, I’m not sure how much I…

A few weeks ago I had a momma pipevine swallowtail egg bomb our Aristolochia fimbriata plants. We have several different mounds of the plants as the original location has spread via seed to other locations in the garden, and this isn’t a problem because we get one or two generations of caterpillars coming through and mowing the plants down the last few years. This year momma (or mommas more likely) gave us an estimated 60-70 caterpillars. I didn’t bother counting but we were overrun with them and even had smaller instars while the larger, later instars were gorging themselves on pipevine. I know those early instars did not survive because…

Over the weekend I came across a new-to-me butterfly in the garden while we were working on the edible garden fencing. It flitted from blackberry flower to blackberry flower and my first reaction was “oh, the long-tailed skippers are here already?” Then I did a double take and realized that wasn’t a long-tailed skipper and it was something different. I didn’t have my phone so I tried to burn the image into my memory so I could look it up in my field guide when I went inside. Flipping through the field guide while I was eating lunch I came across the white-striped longtail in Kaufmann’s Butterflies of North America…

Despite the delay in spring, things are slowly waking up and moving along in the garden. I still haven’t mulched all of the flower beds nor have I caught up on clearing the paths of weeds, but I’m doing what I can. Frankly, I look back at the energy I had even with a newborn and a toddler and can’t believe I managed to stay mostly (ok, not really) on top of what I did. These days I do what I can and say boo to the rest. At some point the paths will be weeded and I’ll get some more mulch down but until then… This gulf coast toad…