Halfrey Cottage Critter and Garden Journal

We’re rapidly moving toward fall here at Halfrey Cottage. Leaves are coming down from the trees like rain, and it seems we need to sweep the gravel just about every day to keep it tidy. Well, we don’t actually sweep it every day, thus it generally is not all that tidy.

Our hearts-a-bustin’, or euonymous, are showing their fall color. Right now they’re all covered with these red seed pods with the dangling red seeds. The dogwood would also be covered in red berries if the squirrels had not eaten every single berry two or three weeks ago, while they were still green. (more…)

Some people call it a weed. In fact, some would say that the name of the plant is pokeweed, not pokeberry. I’m on a one-man mission to change that because if a plant is called a weed, everyone assumes that it’s no good. That’s not true at all of pokeberry.

You’ve seen it growing in vacant lots, next to houses, poking out of sidewalks, or just about anywhere. It’s a fast growing, succulent (wet-stemmed) perennial that might get to be ten feet high under the right conditions. (more…)

I’ve often mentioned my green lynx spiders in this blog. This is the time of year where they really start to get interesting, because by early fall, the spiders are getting pretty big. I caught this pretty cool shot of one of my big girls eating a wasp. That seems like pretty dangerous prey because, well, wasps are killers too. But the green lynx can handle them just fine. I’ve also seen the eating great big bumble bees. (more…)

For the past couple of years we’ve been bringing a few extra special black swallowtail caterpillars inside to raise “by hand”. Why do we do this? For one thing, it’s fun. For another, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, we hate see all of our black swallowtail caterpillars get eaten, and when we leave them outside, most of them end up as someone’s dinner.

Raising black swallowtail caterpillars is pretty easy. In case anyone wants to try it, I’ll boil it down into a few steps. (more…)

I’ve been staking out our hummingbird feeder with my digital camera zoomed in as close as it can go. The feeder is on the front porch, so I can set on the porch swing with the camera on the tripod, waiting, watching. It’s not easy to get a decent picture. Even though I’m only on the other side of the front porch, for something as small as a hummingbird, that’s pretty far. I did finally get a reasonable pic, though.

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A decent action shot, but you can’t make out his color at all. I won’t be winning any awards for this one.

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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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