Gardens-In-The-Sand

Changing Weather

While there are still butterflies and flowers, veggies in the garden, the drought makes pictures of them unremarkable. Once the weather changes, I start aiming the camera at the songbirds.... They're a lot more difficult to shoot than the butterflies are....

Towhee

Some kinda wren...

Mockingbird... Kinda unusual to catch these guys on the ground...

Cardinal... peaking around the iris... I'm catching these birds at the goldfish pond....

The goldfish don't seem to mind...

As interesting as the mockingbird on a rock was, this woodpecker on the ground was really cool.

Hmm... the audubon website sez they eat fish...

Is this guy eating seeds or catching pine sawfly caterpillars?

I took a pic of those guys a couple weeks ago....

Spotted a (ripe) tomato this morning.... This one is in a tomato cage.... all the tomatoes that I left sprawling.... are getting eaten by the cats... before they even start turning!

And.... stupid possums and raccoons are causing plenty of heartache in the garden too....

I plant carrots and turnips, rutabagurs, and when I water.... it attracts varmints that till the moist ground.... not good for seedlings.

Had a light frost this week.... covered some stuff with bed sheets, but even the stuff I missed... probably didn't burn enough to prevent the fruit from ripening.

Finally, some autumn colour, sassafras above and osage orange below.

Very impressive drought going on here in the Southeast....

Map borrowed from the drought monitor site

And... The smoke from those fires is affecting us...

Dry Autumn

Very dry here... we've had 2 hurricanes and a tropical storm blow through, and haven't seen any precipitation from any of it...

I visited a butterfly garden a couple months ago, and snuck out with a seed head or two...

The seeds came up readily from this seasons plants....

I count 6 butterflies in this pic...

The cosmos seems to have attracted a couple of migrants... monarch and long wing zebra... first time seeing either this year.... Unfortunately, neither stuck around long...

I do have a few other flowers....

Bee visits prenanthes

Buckeye butterfly visiting daisy mum.

Another pic of the daisy mums

What's funny, is this mexican clover (Richardia scabra), at the foot of the daisy mums... actually seems like the bigger attraction... as far as the butterflies are concerned!

camellia oleifera in bed next to house

First year crop from the black walnuts... Wish I'd recorded what year I planted the seeds.

Sunflower growing through the sassafrass....

The beetles are killing the pines...

Wildflower season

Every autumn, we finally get a wildflower season when all the weeds out in the un-tilled places bloom... and sadly... just as the butterflies are finding them, the roadside crews get busy turning a riot of colour into brown stubble.

Seems to be nothing I can do about the road side, but enjoy the flowers at my house... And for God's sake... Don't mow anything!

I planted these ironweeds in the vegetable garden multiple times only to have them die. too dry.
This ironweed is planted next to the house where it gets extra water off the roof. the butterflies are happy that I kept trying...

A twofer... gotta look close, (or enlarge), not the best light for shooting butterflies.

Agalinis in the rear-view mirror.

Spotted these caterpillars on the scratch daisies...cucullia alfarata...

camphorweed cucullia... Camphorweed Owlet Moth.

Incidentally... I also spotted A couple Selenisa sueroides on the sesbania... but couldn't locate them again when I finally brought back the camera.... gotta be quick or miss out. That caterpillar was very cool... and online pics do not capture it at all.
Edit...
Here's the Selenisa sueroides...

I kept checking the sesbania... and suddenly a new batch of caterpillars. they're not waving their tails like the first one did... but still... neat cat.

oenonthra filipes

Blue curls (Trichostema dichotomum)

Camphor weed and golden aster

Also the golden aster buds seem picture worthy

eupatorium serotinum

Southern Oak leech (aureolaria pectinata)

While we're doing "southern"... This is southern joint weed...

I've also got Dixie whitetop aster...

Wasn't easy identifying this...

http://garden.org/thread/view/41697/Another-eupatorium/

Pretty interesting how many unusual plants I have here that Nobody recognizes...

How about an american lady on a wood sunflower?

Last year I took video of a goldfinch chewing the seeds out of this clump of wild sunflower...
Speaking of gold....

In this day and age of Zika, everybody should have these guys in all their water features.... they spend all their time vacuuming the surface of the water!