Butterfly Gardening Blog

I’ve gotten a few of our Legacy grass plugs in now. I still have a lot to do though – it is hard work! With legacy you can just kill an area of existing grass with Roundup and then put the plug in. But I still dug away the dead grass around it to make it easier for it to grow. I’m a little concerned about how well it will compete with the other grass in our yard. Here is one plug shortly after it was planted:

(Technorati Tags: grass, buffalo grass, Legacy, lawn)

Later on Friday I took the following picture of frog eggs on a Nelumbo lutea leaf in one of our ponds. The pond is the one pictured on April 7th.

(Technorati Tags: frog eggs, pond, frogs)

I have no idea how to make ‘Mantis’ plural – is it ‘Manti’, ‘Mantis’s’? Either way – some hatched!

We always have lots of preying mantis laying eggs around our gardens in the fall and I always look forward to the first day the following spring when I first see the little babies crawling and jumping around. I hate to admit it but I almost get more excited about the baby preying mantises than I do the butterflies sometimes! They are just so cute!

The little guy in the picture below I found in front of our house near the door. Later I saw at least 4 different individuals. There are likely many, many more around too!

I didn’t measure him/her and its hard to tell the scale from this picture, but I’d say it was less than 2 cm long. They don’t particularily like to sit still for photos either, so I did good to get this one picture:

I think I got the picture thing and the paragraph problem straightened out now – I ended up installing an older version of WP. I will add a bunch of pictures, but I want them posted on the date I took them so I will add back a few post dated entries here.

I’m also going to better organize my blog categories – so posts may be moving around for a few hours until I get it straightened out.

— update: I have all the pictures I have so far on the blog now! I think I have all the categories organized right now too!

Here are a couple of Black Swallowtail caterpillars from the first batch of Black Swallowtail eggs I’ve had this year. They are feeding on fennel.

Recently we found a Robin’s nest up in a trellis/arbor/whatever-you-call-it my husband built:

Here it is from a distance with a circle drawn around where the nest is:

We’ve been wanting to grow buffalo grass for a long time, but we knew we couldn’t afford to redo our whole lawn. When our sewer line needed to be worked on this spring, rather than sowing the area with a non-native grass seed, we got some buffalo grass instead. Then we decided to start more elsewhere – with both seeds and plugs. It’s kind of an experiment – we’ll start it in different places and see how well it grows and spreads.

Buffalo grass (Bucheloe dactyloides) is a native lawn grass. There are many varieties available. In general, in tends to need less water, many varieties grow great in clay and need mininal mowing.

I bought some Legacy plugs recently, I need to get them planted soon. It only grows to be 4-6 inches high, needs only 15 inches of water per year, loves clay and grows fast. Here is the tray of Legacy plugs I bought recently:

Here is one of the areas my husband is growing a different variety of Buffalo grass in – it is called Topgun:

My Golden Alexanders are starting to bloom too:

Our Irises are blooming now too. I don’t know what type they are, they were here when we bought the house:

I don’t know why these have all fallen over:

My small Lilac bush – Miss Kim, I believe – is starting to bloom. This is not a plant that butterflies really have an interest in and I don’t think they are native either. But I really like the smell of lilacs, so I planted just one small one a few years ago:

My husband has some Nelumbo lutea (American Lotus) growing in barrels. I bought the seeds from these from a place that sells just Missouri native plants. They are just starting to grow back:

Here some of the sunflowers my husband has started – he made little cages around them to keep the rabbits from eating them:

One of my scabiosas (pin cushion flowers) started blooming:

So did the snapdragons. They aren’t native – but are used by Buckeyes as a host plant. I haven’t never seen any on mine though.

Wood Betony is native and I believe is a secondary host plant for either Buckeyes or Baltimore’s: