I've been so busy lately, it's been difficult to even get out into the garden, let alone post about it. Once in a while though something appears to me, visible from the office window, and I need to react.
Saw a cool little spider on the rose the other day...
I've been doing quite a bit of cleanup in the garden the last week or so, and much of that work involved pulling leftover leaf clutter out from under some plants. (Some was left as mulch intentionally over the winter, and some is from the oak tree that drops leaves until early spring it seems.) I've noticed so many different types of spiders under there, what are categorized as "hunting spiders" because they don't build webs to catch prey.
The Pacypodium lamerei just keeps going. Blooming for months, providing shelter for a growing mantis (since moved on), and now, well...
It's the time of year when the orb weavers and other big spiders are very visible in the garden. I've seen the large webs in many places for the last couple of weeks, and have run into those crazy strong support strands that somehow cross paths that span 7' (2m) or more.
I was inspired to take macro photos of tiny insect nymphs yesterday. It's been quite a while since I've done this, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is!
Friday the 13th, a good time for a post about a scary (for many) gardening topic: spiders!
If you follow me on Instagram you'll know that I saw a nice fat female mantis in the ribbon bush yesterday afternoon. One reason that late summer is so wonderful to me is that it has all of the best insect life (except for baby mantises, which are probably the most fun insects and hatch in June)
One of the things that I love about having a garden is the amount of tiny wildlife it attracts. I've found so many fascinating and beautiful insects and arachnids out there, sometimes I just have to share.
How many spiders call your garden home? By some estimates and depending on the type of garden you have (grassy, forested, etc.) it could be thousands or tens of thousands. They clearly are the most abundant predator in gardens..
This is going to be one of the shortest posts I've done in quite a while, but those MOBOT posts were long ones and they took a lot out of me. So I just have one question today:
As I've recently said, fall is big spider time in the garden, and there are two that I've been watching and photographing.
I love this time of year in the garden. The grasses are all full, topped with fuzzies, and home to many noisy grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets.
If you've been reading my blog for a while you probably know that I love the drama that large plants add to the garden: bamboo, elephant ears, castor bean, large grasses, gunnera -- all plants that make an impact even from across the yard. You probably also know that I love the other end of the scale too, taking a close look at the plants and creatures that inhabit my garden.
The other day I was taking some photos of my young "black bamboo" (Phyllostachys nigra), and discovered this little scene on one of the bamboo culms:
As Halloween approaches, people are decorating their houses. There are fun decorations, scary decorations, and those that fall somewhere between the two. The fake spiderwebs that people stretch over bushes are in that category for me. They're supposed to be scary, but they're really not. For one thing, they don't look like real spiderwebs -- they're kinda like webby fleece that's been stretched around. The main reason they don't produce any anxiety in me though, is that I've walked into real spiderwebs before.
I've just spent the day in the garden working on step one of a bamboo project that will take another day at least, and I'm pretty much exhausted. I'll post about that project tomorrow, but today is a day to catch up with a few interesting things I've seen recently.
I haven't been out in the yard taking photos the last few days, and I'm not sure of the reason. Yes, it's been cloudy and wet recently, but today it was clear, cool, and beautiful -- so weather isn't the excuse. I guess I just wasn't in the mood. Unfortunately that leaves me with nothing to talk about in this post... or so I thought. As I went outside to mow the lawn this evening, I noticed this "bug" was still in the same spot that I had seen it earlier in the day, and yesterday too if I remember right.
I'm going way back into the garden photo archives for today's post, which is something I don't normally do except when I want to show how things have changed in my yard, or how some plant did in previous years. Today it's all in the past though, and it's not going to be pretty. Did you read yesterday's post about the insect photos from last summer? Did you get to the photo of the ants on the big dead caterpillar? Did you find it to be creepy? If so, was it the ants that bothered you, or the death aspect? Or maybe the giant caterpillar? If it was the caterpillar that you didn't like, then you're really not going to enjoy today's post.
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