Spring is coming

Barbarians at the gate...

A year and a half trying to fence the deer out of the exclusion zone... The last several months, fence looked absolutely impervious, yet bambi continued leaving fresh tracks everywhere inside the wire... and eating stuff...

Addams family flower garden... Bambi apparently has a taste for columbine flower stalks...

Or maybe Thumper's responsible... Caught 2 rabbits this week...

Here's trouble... Emptied rabbit from trap & caught this huge raccoon next night... They're after the chickens... able to kill yardbirds through the wire...

And then... there's the good stuff... Like this zebra swallowtail...

And this gorgeous leafwing...

 

Pawpaw flower... Tree doesn't look like much yet, but saw a zebra swallowtail laying eggs... ran for camera, but she was done and gone... so no pics of that...

Climate mitigation... cooking meal with dropped limbs on kick-down converted propane grill.

It's autumn...

 Scattered frost this morning... Had ghost pepper seedlings just coming up in a pot got frost burnt...

And still, sun came out, temp improved and the butterflies came out in force!

Gulf fritillary showing off it's ultra-violet spots as it nectars at hot lips salvia...

Another frit...

Zebra longwings...

Another one...

Cloudless sulfur

American holly

Check all those berries at the top!

American lady.... kinda looks like it's been around for it's life expectancy...

Flowers on camellia sasanqua.

Blue stem

Jewels of Opar

Mother hen and biddy

And... Some autumn colour on a maple!

Hot and dry

 The rains stopped... the weather turned hot... 

Not a surprise, the rains this spring were the unusual weather...

With the end of the rain, and the near constant heat, came the fun of portaging water from the rain barrels and attempting to keep a few plants going...

And... the deer fence started getting tested as the desperate critters wanted something to eat that wasn't crunchy...

Pear tree...

Pepper plant...

Maxixe vine

A few of the plants being consumed by mother deer...

Incidentally.... I saw the spotted fawn she stashed in the woodland, inside the deer fence...

Feels kind of bad needing to fence them out... But, I have the fence to protect a little bit of my efforts...

Mulberry stump

Mulberry posts...

The birds planted a lot of mulberry trees everywhere I put in gardens... So plenty of post materials...

Cut down a mulberry tree, and it grows right back, so I get multiple posts from the same tree.

There were a number of areas where the weight of the vines (muscadine, Carolina jessamine, smilax) made the fence vulnerable... 

so... cut the vines off the fence... add new taller posts, additional fencing above the original... Tie the two fences together with some twine...and cross fingers.

Here's some pics from before everything turned crunchy...

Broken colour 4 o'clock

Yellow echinacea (paradoxa)

American lady and echinacea purpurea

Daisies and Kniphofia

Rudbeckia hirta

I didn't have the heart to take pictures of the brown strawberry plants or the dying carrot bed...  

More spring colour

 Kitchen lizard... Anole on cooking pot... So cute!

Monarch on a kale leaf... That's not where the milkweeds are!

(Like these matelea... milk weed vine)

American lady sunning on bucket... Again, that's not where the host plants are!

Knockout roses, grown from cuttings...

Clematis florida... Also grown from a cutting...

Passiflora

Blue Bunting... Bird kept moving every time I tried to get pic.

Amaryllis and iris

Mulberries! Absolutely loaded this year...

Ragweed Daze

The danglepod (Sesbania herbacea) is blooming...

I discovered this native plant growing wild in a meadow [last year] in Macon.

The butterflies seem happy with this new fabaceae.

Elephants foot flower (Elephantopus tomentosus)

Hyssop Leaf Thoroughwort (Eupatorium hyssopifolium)  with Red-banded Hairstreak (Calycopis cecrops)

 American lady visits society garlic

The long tailed skipper wants to be a society butterfly too.

A coupla sulfurs drinking from the same cup.

Lespadeeza bloom.

This Eastern Towhee made a fuss about me walking through the garden... 

Smart bird... difficult to photograph in the shadows.

 Winged sumac (Rhus copallinum ) bloom

and fruit.

Red Chenille (acalypha reptans), a future lawn alternative, for shade.

The ragweed is blooming... Dreadful stuff... I'm pulling all I see.