A Day Among the Butterflies

Today was perfect--sunny, 72 degrees, breezy, and to top it off, I didn't have to work. I stayed home and spent the day barefoot among the flowers and butterflies. We have more butterflies on our property than I have seen anywhere--and the odd thing is, I don't have that many flowers planted yet.

One of my goals for this summer is to photograph and identify as many butterflies as I can.  Thanks to friends who have identified photos I've been  posting on facebook, I have more than doubled my butterfly knowledge in the past week or so. However this yellow butterfly has eluded identification so I am hoping one of my blog readers will be able to identify it for us:

It is sitting on the tip of my thumb and is about an inch and half or so across. I haven't seen very many of these, but the ones that I did see all have similar markings. They seem to like the tansy flowers.

(Edited to add--Laura at Forest Walk Art indentified the yellow "butterfly". It is acutally a moth--a False Crocus Geometer (Xanthotype urticaria). Thanks Laura!)

The next butterfly is a Variegated Fritillary--this is a bit smaller than a monarch. I haven't seen many of these around.

Pearl Crescent--this is a smaller butterfly, about an inch across. We have dozens of these little butterflies.

Side view of a Pearl Crescent. This one is actually dead and is being eaten by a very strange looking bug.

Milbert's Tortoiseshell--there were dozens of these on my butterfly bush today.

Side view of a Milbert's Tortoiseshell.

Cabbage butterfly--one of the few butterflies I already knew. The little green caterpillars that you see on cabbage and broccoli turn into this lovely white butterfly. The caterpillars do some damage to crops, but I pick them off the food crops and plant extra kale in the flower beds so that I have plenty of the butterflies to enjoy. This is our most abundant butterfly and often I can count 40-50 in the yard at one time.

I also got to see more buckeyes and red spotted purple butterflies, as well as monarchs, and swallowtails (both black and tiger) and several other butterflies I don't yet know the names of.

Katydid and Daylily

A few days ago, this katydid sat all day in this daylily.

I went out the next morning, and she was still there, but this time sitting on top the wilted flower.

.Later in the day, another flower opened, and she made that one her new home.

Apparently katydids love eating daylilies. You can see the white spots on the flower where she has been nibbling. I don't see katydids that often. so I don't mind sharing these blooms with this one.

Tiny Toadstool Trio

I have been doing a Facebook photo challenge, where you take a photo a day and post it to Facebook. I didn't realize it would be so hard to take at least one half way decent or creative photo every single day. Some days I end up with a bunch of less then perfect or blurry photos and at the end of the day I'm trying to figure out how to fix at least one to make it worthy of being posted. I have only the simplest of photo editing software--I pretty much can only edit contrast and highlights, and can do some sharpening as well as adjust saturation. 

The best of today's photos is a very blurry photo of a group of cute little mushrooms that I found growing in my garden mulch. With editing contrast and highlights multiple times and playing with the sharpening feature I think I finally made the photo look like it was meant to be softly blurry and almost like a painting.

A Dinner fit for a Registered Dietitian

One of the wonderful things about blogging are the many new people and places it brings into our lives. This evening we finally had friends I met through this blog over to our home for dinner. Diana and her husband are the garlic farmers I bought my new varieties of garlic from last fall. I found her blog three years ago when I was googling for information about raising chickens in the city. Once we realized we both lived in the same city we arranged to meet, once for coffee. Two years ago we both bought property out in the country. The first thing she and and her husband did with their new land was get the soil ready for garlic beds to be planted that fall.  Last year I visited her new garlic farm and bought some of her garlic.

Diana is a registered dietitian and a cancer survivor who has written a book and regularly give lectures related to nutrition and cancer. I must admit I woke up this morning suddenly feeling very self conscious about what I was thinking about cooking for dinner. (I need not have worried though--with a garden full of fresh vegetables, it would have been very difficult to go wrong!)

So what does one make for a dinner when a registered dietitian is coming?

I started with a basket full of vegetables picked fresh from the garden...summer cabbage, carrots, onions, patty pan squash, green peppers, and new potatoes:

The cabbage, carrots, and the smallest onion were turned into coleslaw.

The patty pan squash, peppers, and onions were marinated with portabella mushrooms, olive oil and garlic and a splash of apple cider vinegar, then roasted until just tender.

I tossed the new potatoes with olive oil, sea salt, and fresh rosemary then roasted them until tender. .

This was all served with pecan encrusted tilapia fish fillets--a simple, but very delicious baked fish recipe.  

Pecan Encrusted Fish Fillets

4 mild fish fillets ( I use pollack or tilapia)

1/2 cup chopped pecans

1/3 cup Parmesan cheese

1/4 cup fresh parsley or celery (finely chopped)

3 T lemon juice

1 T olive oil

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Combine cheese, pecans, parsley, olive oil, and 2 T lemon juice.

Place fish in a single layer in a baking dish and spread with pecan mixture. Drizzle with remaining lemon juice.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until fish flakes with a fork

The meal was topped off with some local raspberry wine made by Sandhill Crane Vineyards, and a blueberry pie, baked with berries my brother and I picked a few days ago at a local blueberry farm.

This post is part of Farmgirl Friday over at Dandelion House.

Hosta Garden At Hidden Lake Gardens

 One of my brothers is visiting me for a few days. As he loves plants too, we took the opportunity to finally go visit Hidden Lake Gardens, which is about an hour from where I live. Hidden Lake Gardens is 200 acres of beautifully maintained gardens, hiking trails, nature areas with meadows and forest, scenic winding paved roads, and a conservatory. There are all kinds of rare plants and trees and everything is tagged. It is the kind of place where you need to bring a notebook and take notes so you can remember what you need to buy later to plant in your own garden.

I thought we had given ourselves plenty of time to explore the many gardens. As it turned out, we were barely at the first garden, the Hosta Garden, for more than 5 minutes when my brother turned to me and said, "How long did you say we are going to be here? We need at least three days."

To which I replied, "We will be lucky if we get beyond this hosta garden at all today."

(We did manage to see more than just the hosta garden, but not much more!)

The hosta garden was full of hostas of many different sizes, textures, and colors. I knew that there are hundreds of different kinds of hostas, but have never seen so many in one place. The thing that amazed me is that  a garden planted 90% with just one type of plant worked---the garden wasn't just educational, it was  a work of beauty.

The entrance of the hosta garden has several mini varieties that are barely more than a few inches tall.



A little stream runs through the garden and adds to the charm. (It is hard to see in my photo unfortunately.)

This one was my favorite for the flowers. It is called "Tosana" and its abundant delicately striped flowers rise tall above short green leaves.

This one is my favorite for a combination of foliage and flowers. "Joseph" is a medium size compact plant with with luxurious pink flowers and glossy green leaves.

My favorite for foliage alone (it was hard to pick a favorite!) has got to "Silver Threads and Golden Needles". The gold and green are brilliant in the shade.

And finally a favorite place for wedding photos in the garden....

Some day I would love to have a garden much like this one. One can always dream!

(Next Hidden Lakes Garden blog post: The Ultimate Playhouse Tree!)



Tomato Monster

A tobacco hornworm (related to the tomato hornworm)  hungrily devours his way through a row of tomato plants.

Butterflies

 One of the surprising benefits of having chickens is that butterflies are attracted to the droppings...as strange as that sounds. They seem to like chicken poop as much as they like flowers. This blue and black butterfly is one of our most abundant butterflies this year and I can always find a few hanging around the chicken coop. It is called a red spotted purple. (The red spots are on the underside of the wings.)

Does anyone know the name of this butterfly?  Here it is pausing for a moment on the purple silk of Spring Treat sweet corn.

Has anyone else noticed that chicken droppings attract butterflies?

This post is part of the barn hop at Homestead Revival.