Gardens-In-The-Sand

American Lady

This American Lady butterfly came out with the warmer temps this last week.

It got me researching the difference between this one and the painted lady.

Seems there's a white dot on an orange bar that the painted lady doesn't have, which doesn't seem real noticeable when they're out in the garden. Otherwise, count the eyespots.

The missouri prairie foundation explains with pictures

There are other differences.

In 2016, I posted several pictures of the American lady depositing eggs on cudweed

The painted lady uses thistle as a host plant. Unfortunately, I can't seem to keep thistles growing in my sandhill garden. I had a nice patch one time, back in 2013. I can't recall caterpillars on the thistles.

Labels: butterflies

October 2025

This Spring, I planted some unlabeled watermelon seed...

After the fruit got ripe... They turned into citron melons... Now what?

They taste like cucumbers... I've tried adding to chicken salad sandwiches, I've tried cubed into ramen noodles... still looking for an ideal use that doesn't involve pounds of sugar...

When searching google... seems the South Africans use the leaves and seeds in stews... too late for that, the leaves all fell off the vines...

Made a new shovel handle that I'm pretty happy with.

I have a hop hornbeam stump sending up sprouts that make acceptable tool handles...

I've been making a few collages...

The zebra longwing and caterpillar...

Pawpaw collage, I originally planted pawpaws for the zebra swallowtail, but after getting ripe fruit... I'm planting more...

Some of the butterfly & moth photos I've taken in this garden...

Labels: butterflies, citron, pawpaw

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.

Labels: butterflies, trap

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!

Labels: berries, butterflies, camellia

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...