"The Love Of Gardening Is A Seed Once Sown That Never Dies"--Gertrude Jekyll

 About a year ago I let a neighbor grow some kale and eggplant in Cindy's raised beds.  See The Gardener Is Gone....  He got busy with other things and didn't have much time to attend to the veggies he had planted, but they continued to grow.  

That left several of the raised veggie beds vacant, so when the family next door found that their own vegetable bed was being raided by voracious raccoons, I invited them to plant their veggies in Cindy's beds.  The drip irrigation was all in place, the soil she had filled them with was waiting, and her security system of anti-varmint panels was ready for action.  

So they came over with their kids, Maggie and Jude, and planted veggies, sowing seeds of carrots, beets and corn, and waited for them to germinate.  Then they added some broccoli and cauliflower plants that were a little further along, and those have been thriving ever since.  

And now another neighborhood family has joined us and has planted their veggies, too, so on Saturday we all had a Ladybug Release Party, turning hundreds of Ladybugs free to feast on the aphids and other pests that were eating the plants. 

Neighbors Tending The Garden

Kids Are Learning Gardening

Release More Ladybugs

Ladybug Ready for Release

It's been fun for me to look out into the garden and see it being productive and full of life, both vegetable and human, again.  And I know Cindy would approve that her garden space is helping educate and encourage a new generation of gardeners.  

Milkweed Bugs

Large Milkweed Bugs

A few days ago Cindy and I were out in the butterfly garden in the front yard, when we saw some strange-looking red and black bugs clustered on one of the Asclepia plants.  The bugs all had red bodies with oblong black markings on both head and tail ends and a black band around the middle.  Neither of us had ever seen anything like them before.

A little research revealed that they are Large Milkweed Bugs, Oncopeltus fasciatus.  Who knew there was such a thing?  We didn't.

Asclepia

The bugs love Asclepia, which is, of course, milkweed, and feed on the seed pods.  Because the milkweed sap contains a toxic substance called cardiac glycosides, the bugs themselves become toxic when they ingest the sap, making them unattractive to predators.

Although we've had several Monarch butterflies hanging out in the butterfly garden this summer, we've seen very few Monarch caterpillars this year.  Cindy has been reluctant to spray the Aphids off the plants because she doesn't want to wash off any Monarch eggs, but the plants aren't looking very good because of the honeydew secreted by the Aphids.  The Lady Bugs are eating the Aphids, but we're concerned that they may be eating Monarch eggs, too.

It's not easy being a caterpillar codependent.

Codependent to Caterpillars

Monarch Butterfly Caterpillar on Asclepia

That would be us.  After the fiasco of the Monarch butterfly caterpillars on the Asclepia bush in the back yard, when the Scrub Jays picked off the last of the Monarch caterpillars, we moved that bush to the front yard and ran out and bought three more small Asclepias because a new lot of caterpillars were rapidly stripping what was left of the leaves off the original bush.  Then more Monarchs visited the new bushes and laid eggs.

Asclepia Protective Fencing

We originally tried to protect the new caterpillars by using some plastic fencing around the bush, thinking that critters were getting at them, but we quickly discovered that the caterpillars were getting confused and climbing on the green fencing instead of staying on the Asclepia.  We were concerned that they would not find their way back to the Asclepia to get the food they need to thrive, so we took it off and that was the end of the protective fencing  experiment.  It looked pretty peculiar anyway, so we weren't sorry to see it go.  I can't figure out how to re-size this picture, but it's easy to see how ugly it was.

Since we moved the old plant and the three new ones to the front yard, we've had a resurgence of the caterpillars.  I counted seventeen of them one day last week.  Most of them seem to have survived the heavy rains of the last week.

The problem recently has been that all four of the plants, in addition to losing leaves to the voracious appetite of the caterpillars, were heavily infested with aphids.  There were also several very happy Lady Bugs, busily chowing down on the aphid buffet, but they really couldn't really keep up with the numerous aphids, which would eventually kill the plants unless we do something about them.

So today Cindy farmed out about ten of the larva to a neighbor who also has Asclepia, bought a couple of new Asclepia plants, complete with their own caterpillars, moved the remaining four of our caterpillars to the new plants, and cleaned the aphids off the first group of plants.  She put the new plants next to the Bougainvillea so that the caterpillars have something to climb up on to form their chrysalises.  Apparently they prefer to create the chrysalis on some other plant, which is probably wise considering how likely it is that one of their fellow caterpillars would eat the Asclepia leaf the chrysalis was on.  Now they have a place to make the chrysalises, so we're hoping we'll eventually see the whole Monarch butterfly process.