The October Garden and Monarch Foster Success

I'm afraid I haven't blogged in a while.  The garden just looked too sad throughout the dog days of August, especially after Hurricane Harvey blew through.  The island beds and the back border were taken over by Bermuda grass and other weeds that I just couldn't keep up with.

That's not to say that the weeds are now under control - they aren't, by any means.  But it always seems that the garden gets its second wind in October.

The Lantana, which seemed to languish all summer, is blooming profusely again.  I have several, in containers as well as in the island beds.  Lantana is always a favorite with the butterflies, which makes it a favorite of mine too!

I have three Rose of Sharon bushes, all sprouted from cuttings I brought over from my last house 9 years ago.  The one below, which gets afternoon shade from the fence on the west side of our property, seems to do best.  The one on the other side of the garden, which struggles with full sun all day, as well as turf grass all round, is barely hanging on.  I may transplant it somewhere else this fall.

Last year, this Pink Muhly grass was little more than a big ant hill.  I have at least, managed to banish the ants, if not the Bermuda grass that seems to invade everywhere.  I was so happy I happened to look out in to the garden at just the right time to see the plumes turn vibrant pink in the morning sun.

 If you recall earlier this year, I raised and released some Monarch butterflies. I had hoped to raise a lot more but things didn't go as planned and I only released a few more and had a few sad losses which almost made me give up.  Then one of my friends told me she was going out of town and asked if I would mind keeping an eye on the chrysalides she had been raising, and releasing the butterflies when they were ready.

Would I ever!!

So Barbara brought over two hampers with a total of about 60 chrysalides and since then I have released six or more of them each day!

Luckily the hampers are easy to carry out and set on the patio table, and then I just let each on crawl on my fingers and make a note of whether it's male or female, before letting it fly off into the garden.  I'm at 51 and counting as of today!

I'll finish my post with a volunteer that showed up in the garden.  It's in more or less the same place that the wild bergamot grew and bloomed earlier this year.

I did a bit of sleuthing and have identified it as Mikania scandens, also known as Climbing Hempweed, Climbing Hempvine and Climbing Boneset.

It's very definitely a weed, having taken over a corner of the island bed and twined itself around the wind chimes.

I would have yanked it out of the ground at first sight except that the blooms reminded me of clover blooms.  Knowing how much honey bees enjoy clover, I wondered if this attract them as well, so I let it grow and bloom.

Sure enough - on close examination today I found several bees enjoying the flowers, like the one in the photo above.  So I guess it can stay for a while :-)

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

Up the Monarch Nursery Trail

In my last post (a month ago!!!) I predicted I'd be seeing more Monarch butterflies, along with caterpillars and chrysalides, as we progressed in to August.  Well I'm happy to report that my predictions were correct.

During the week I clipped some leaves that had eggs on and brought them inside. (If you click on the images, you can see a larger version to see the eggs)  This method was suggested by members of a Facebook group, but I found that the leaves shriveled very quickly and went crisp before the eggs had hatched.

Once the eggs were hatched I added fresh leaves each day, but it's a lot of work keeping the container clean and I was terrified I was going to throw out a hatchling with the frass (caterpillar poop) and crispy leaves. In addition, the tiny hatchlings seem bound and determined to escape.  They were all over the place!

Now those caterpillars have grown a bit, I have transferred them to milkweed clippings in water picks, like the ones in the photo below. I think this is my preferred method.  If I can find stems with eggs and small caterpillars on them, I can cut out the first step above.

Giving them fresh milkweed is just a case of taking new cuttings and placing them in picks right next to the ones already there.  The caterpillars move over to the fresh leaves pretty quickly and then I can just remove the old ones.

The photo above was taken through the back door, with a bird screen on it, so it's not a great shot.  But do you see anything strange about this photo?

See that little flash of orange in the center of the photo?

There it is again - top left.  A Queen butterfly!  She was flitting around the milkweed as I was collecting clippings and when I went in to get my camera to try and get a photo of her, I couldn't believe when she started laying eggs on the stems I had left on the table!

See her little gift in the middle of the leaf?  

If you look at the enlarged version of this pic, you can see there's a tiny caterpillar on here too.  Not sure if it's a Monarch or a Queen.

So here I go on the Monarch Nursery trail again.

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

New Year's Monarch!

I've been keeping a close eye on our house guests since my last post. I had to make several trips round the garden to clip more milkweed for the hungry caterpillars.  And in the process I inadvertently brought a few more indoors along with the milkweed!

I ended up with a total of 13.

Thankfully they all pupated without any problems and I no longer had to scour the garden for greenery for they.

Yesterday I noticed one of them was turning color and by the time I took this photo last night, another one was starting to turn color as well.

Over the course of the morning I went into the bathroom to check on them several times, but of course I missed the actual moment of eclosing!

When I went in there just now, this beautiful Monarch was hanging from its empty chrysalis, drying out its wings.

I'll be cutting up some fruit, such as grapes and melon, and putting it on a saucer to feed the butterfly until it's ready to be released.  I learned that little trick from a wonderful Facebook group I found -- Monarch and Milkweed Network, Houston, Texas area.

So -- one down, 12 more to go!  Happy New Year!!!

Update:  A couple of hours after I published this blog, the second butterfly emerged.  Here he/she is still unfolding their wings!

Update 2: We have one boy and one girl so far.  Here they are having just been introduced to some nice juicy cantaloupe.  I hope they like it!

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Jayne's Country Garden.

The End of Summer and Even More Monarchs

Ooops - it's been a month since my last post! There really hasn't been a lot going on to share with you.  The Profusion Zinnias, which overflowed the island beds all summer are starting to go to seed and look a bit ragged, but the Gulf Fritillaries and other butterflies are still enjoying them.

Ditto the Cleome.  I collected lots of seeds from each of them, so I'll have plenty to share next spring :-)

The Salvia splendens took up the western half of the island bed and is still going strong.That's the first time I've had much success with salvia.  This variety has small red flowers that I have seen the occasional hummingbird taking a sip at.  I've never had luck with the blue/purple varieties though.

The Cosmos, which was just feathery foliage all summer is suddenly a mass of pink flowers.  I must never have paid attention to when it bloomed before.  I thought it was a summer bloomer, but it's here now and looks lovely.

But the most exciting thing going on in the garden at the moment is the number of Monarch caterpillars and chrysalides I have in the Big Cube  cage I purchased back at the beginning of the summer.

I've got a total of 16 in the cage - more than I had back in August! They have been eating me out of house and home but luckily I have some healthy stands of milkweed in the garden that I can take cuttings from.  I just have to make sure there aren't any cats already there when selecting cuttings!

I'm going to be going in to hospital for surgery on October 11th, so I hope I shall see some of them eclose before I go in.  Then my husband is going to take over the Monarch husbandry after that.

At least they should all have pupated by then, so he won't have to pick milkweed for them.  He'll just have to check daily for new butterflies and release them from the cage when they are ready.

I'm linking my post up with Camera Critters. Please take a few minutes to visit and see what other critters stories and photos people are sharing.
Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

More Monarch Success

It's been an exciting weekend, and the new week has started with a bang too! Not only because we have more thunder outside today, but because those three chrysalides I mentioned in my last post all hatched overnight!

That's a total of 8 so far -- and I just noticed two more caterpillars getting ready to pupate!

It looks like we have one male and two females this time.

I "encouraged" them out of the cage on my hand so I could close it up and they all hung out for a spell, drying off their wings, while I went indoors for some coffee.

When I went out later two had already flown out to the garden and only one was left on the outside of the cage.

One neat thing about Monarchs at this stage -- you can get a lot closer to them than you can when they are in the wild.  They are still docile and slow moving. I was even able to let the last one crawl on my hand :-)

She was quite happy to sit there for a minute or two before taking off and heading into the garden for some nectar.

As today is the first day back to school for the children in our area, and since we don't have kids, these photos of butterflies heading off in to the wild blue yonder will have to suffice!!!

I'm linking this post up with Camera Critters today.  If you have a few minutes, visit some of the other blogs participating for some great critter photos.

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

Monarch Butterfly Birthday

In my last post I told you about my Monarch nursery I have going on the back patio.

Well, the last two days have been most exciting!  I went out to check on the cage yesterday morning and what should I see?

TWO of the chrysalides had marched (eclosed) overnight!

I was thrilled to see they were both healthy-looking females.  There were no signs of OE (Ophryocystis elektroscirrha) infection, such as malformed wings, that I have seen in the past.

I opened the flap and, with a little help from me and a ride on my hand for one of them, they exited the cage and rested on the mesh for a while before heading off to the zinnia and milkweed in the island bed.

From what I saw yesterday, there were four more chrysalides and one more caterpillar on the milkweed.    At that time, it didn't appear that any of the chrysalides had turned color, but when I went out to look this morning, a beautiful male had hatched.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of him.  It was so humid this morning my camera lens kept steaming up!

I've been absolutely thrilled with this experience, and we still have three more to go (plus the caterpillar).

I'm going to keep searching the milkweed in the island bed for signs of eggs or caterpillars that can be moved to the cage.

But first, once these have all hatched I need to clean out the cage -- who knew caterpillars could POO so much?!
              Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.

Monarch Nursery

I know it's been a long time since I posted anything, but this time I do actually have an excuse! At the middle of July I went in to St. Luke's Hospital in the Texas Medical Center to have a pituitary tumor removed.  Then I spent a week in the hospital (even spent my 60th birthday in hospital, can you believe!!!) and since then have been recovering at home.

I literally spent three weeks in bed but have started to get up and about recently.  I was getting headaches at first but they seem to have resolved now, thank goodness! I'm just asking it easy and not overdoing things.

So while I was in hospital, the garden was more or less left to its own resources.  The weeds, of course, grew rampant.  The milkweed got covered in aphids and other crud.

During my recovery I've been spending time sitting out on the patio and one day I saw this young lady busy at work, laying eggs on the cruddy milkweed.

Then, it happened that an ad popped up on Facebook, for the Monarch Butterfly Kit to raise Monarchs. So I went ahead and ordered it.

I think they are really designed so you can raise Monarch indoors, but we don't really have anywhere that the cats wouldn't get to it, so I opted to put mine in the back corner of the patio.

I put a couple of bricks on the bottom, to stop it getting blown around by the wind. Then I went around collecting some milkweed cuttings that had caterpillars on, and placing them in the little picks filled with water to keep them fresh-(ish). I also took some other cuttings and cleaned them up, hosed off the aphids etc., and put them in there as well.

Within a day, one of the caterpillars had already departed it's milkweed and was climbing to the top of the cage! Then I saw two more heading that way as well!

This morning I was thrilled to see three chrysalises (chrysalides)!!

Today I plan to see if I can purchase some fresh milkweed from one of our local stores, Plants for All Seasons or The Arbor Gate, if they have any.  That way I can rescue some other caterpillars, and even some eggs, from the ratty milkweed in the island beds.

Wish me luck!

Words and photographs by Jayne Wilson, Green and Serene, Jayne's Country Garden.