Early Spring

The weatherman on television has been complaining about a lack of winter.... That 9 days out of the first two weeks of Feb have been reaching above 70, with more seventies called for for the next seven days too.... doesn't bother me, none.... of course... means that all the winter wood I cut last summer is still sitting there.... I've been burning the left-overs from the previous winter...

Doesn't hurt anything for the firewood to sit in a pile in the yard... when I eventually get it cleaned up, I'll have another place to put in a flower bed. Something about a pile of wood... leaves the soil more productive...

The Carolina Jessamine is going full on.

Seems like the pear trees have been going for a month....

Plum... Can't say what kind... but has the tiniest flowers...

Person I got it from... called it a chickasaw plum,  it does seem to be the same as the Kansas sandhill plum... If different from what I've been calling a Sandhill plum...

The hellebore got kind of a late start this winter....

10 pound rat, anyone?

Possums and raccoons are simply destroying the vegetable garden this winter... I get tiny seedlings emerging, and these pests show up and turn everything under.

And... what they did to my pear trees last autumn...

Sparse turnips... Ok, Ima start cooking these up... directly.

Using the chainsaw to cut back the smilax thicket.... a slow job, and.... I might be robbing the birds of habitat... But did you ever attempt to walk through a smilax patch?

December colours

 Before the rain, deer in the weeds

Deer refusing to participate in a photo shoot.

Helpful house guest! jumping spider, with fly.

Sassafras colour assortment

Potted citrus, bursting with flowers

4 inches of rain over a period of 2 weeks... finally!

Now maybe I can burn a brush pile or two without setting the county on fire... 

New vegetable garden space soon.

The songbirds seem to be very happy with the chenopodium seed...

Killing frost is coming this weekend.... just as the tomatoes were finally gearing up to produce...

Spotted a trail leading from the brush under the garden fence... good place to put the trap... caught Thumper.

Happy cats!

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!

And... Finally.... Check the garden spider that decided to be a bedroom spider...