As the neighbors have tended their plants in the veggie garden, they've found various forms of insect life crawling on the plants or in the soil.
The kids are fascinated by earwigs that they call pinch bugs. Earwigs are scary looking but harmless to humans; they may actually be beneficial to gardens by eating decaying vegetation.
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| Earwig |
Other forms of insect life are various caterpillars or grubs. They found this grub in the soil last week; bugguide.net has let me down and not identified it, but I think it might be the larva of some type of beetle, possibly Figeater Beetle larva. These grubs also eat decaying vegetation, and apparently crawl on their backs, which explains the lack of visible legs. I've always liked seeing the adult Figeater Beetles; I love their iridescent green color, although they're not the most graceful of fliers as they bumble around the garden seemly at random. Various critters, including the neighbors chickens, consider the grubs to be a succulent treat.
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| Grub |
They also found this, possibly a chrysalis. Still no idea what it is, but it, too, got fed to the chickens.
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| Chrysalis? |
Today they found this green caterpillar. I thought at first it was a Cabbage Looper, but it doesn't have the yellow strip on the side and doesn't loop as it crawls. Instead, it looks like it might be the larva of the Cabbage White Butterfly. That caterpillar has a fuzzier body than the Cabbage Looper, but they look pretty similar.
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| Cabbage White Butterfly Larva. Maybe. |
The garden is literally crawling with life all the time.
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