Halfrey Cottage Critter and Garden Journal

I’m not just talking about mosquitos either–though we’ve got plenty of those now too. No. Finally, we’ve got some bugs worth talking about here.

Let’s start with an overview of the primary bug-viewing area: the sun garden.

As I’ve mentioned before, our sun garden is tiny. Halfrey Cottage has a very small urban yard to begin with. And most of that is heavily shaded. There is only about a 15 x 5 patch on one side of that house (under the bay window) that gets any sun to speak of. Over the past couple of years we’ve worked to fill in this whole spot with as many native wild flowers as we can fit there. And by now it’s pretty thick with various species duking it out to see who’s going to get the most space. Right now the mountain mint seems to be dominating some of the other plants. But I think the ageratem is going to rise up again by late summer.

Most of the more flamboyant bugs prefer to hang out in the hot summer sun, in my experience. The sun garden is where I’m most likely to see butterfiles, caterpillars, spiders, mantids, wasps, bees, and other assorted insects. On summer afternoons you’ll often see me peering into the weeds to see what I can see. Let’s take a look at what’s going on right now.
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