The maple trees in the Union County Methodist Church parking lot are beautiful right now.  

 

There are several of them, all showing their gorgeous fall color.  

 

I hope you are seeing fall color wherever you go.

 

 

HAPPY GARDENING!!!

 

This made me smile.  A truck full of mums in the Walmart parking lot.  

 

 

HAPPY FALL Y’ALL!!!

 

Yep.  They are back.  This is the time of year they always show up.  And they LOVE my marigolds.  

 

I love to see Monarchs.  They are so pretty as they “float” on the air.  

 

I know I’ve told you this story before, but maybe I have some new readers who haven’t heard it.  I have a friend in Virginia Beach who used to work inside the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.  He told us that during Monarch migrations they would fly THROUGH the Bay Bridge Tunnel.  

 

That paints such a beautiful picture for me.  I think about it every time I see a Monarch butterfly.  

 

 

HAPPY GARDENING!!!

 

I went out to cut some sage, and look who I found on a little fennel plant.  Five Black Swallowtail caterpillars.  

 

You can see a bunch of different stages.  The Stokes Butterfly book says that the little caterpillars resemble bird poop, so they don’t get eaten.  Actually, I think they use the word “droppings,” but you get the drift.  As they get bigger, they split and shed their skins.  You can see one that just did that all the way to the right.  See the black stuff behind it?  That one almost didn’t make it into my picture.  Anyway, they are getting bigger.

 

It looks like the butterfly laid eggs on the young fennel plants, not on the older ones.  Too bad, because the young plants are small and won’t be able to support that many caterpillars.  See the two on the right?  They have eaten all the leaves on their two stems.  So I cut those two stems and placed them on other young fennel plants.  

 

Good thing we have lots of fennel.

 

 

HAPPY GARDENING!!! 

 

I didn’t see any Virginia creeper that day showing fall color, but we did see this interesting thing.  

 

My SEEK app told me that it is Buffalo Nut.  Here’s what I found on Wikipedia, which is where SEEK got its information:

 

 

I think that’s pretty interesting.  

 

 

HAPPY GARDENING!!!

 

 

 

You know my obsession with poison ivy.  I look for it everywhere.  

 

We were in the park for our walk, and I noticed this poison ivy growing up the trunk of a pine tree.  It is showing fall color, and looking kinda pretty.  Don’t be fooled by it though;  it is still icky.

 

I was looking for some Virginia creeper too, to show you the difference in their fall color, but didn’t see any this day.  I will keep looking, because they are so different.  

 

 

HAPPY GARDENING!!!

 

 

I walked up the front steps just in time to see a bee land on this marigold.  Just in time to see this praying mantis reach out, grab the bee, and eat it.  

 

I was so happy to get this picture, because I wanted you to see the praying mantis up close, with its prey.  WOW!!! 

 

Who needs The Nature Channel?  We have it going on right here on the front porch.

 

 

HAPPY GARDENING!!!

 

OK…A little blurry, but you can see the color of the wasabi radish flowers.  And they taste like radish.  

 

I pulled out one root that was green and about the size of a tennis ball.  It hadn’t started to bloom, so it wasn’t woody yet.  So we grated it into our salad.  WOW!!!  It tastes like wasabi.  

 

I think I’ll let the rest of them go to seed, and use the flowers and seed pods.  It is so much easier than scrubbing the root and grating it.  

 

 

HAPPY GARDENING!!!

 

Do you know what this is?

 

Not broccoli.  It is a wasabi radish getting ready to bloom.

 

They look similar because they are in the Cruciferous family.  They all bloom like this:  first the broccoli-type head, then opening out with 4-petaled flowers.  Arugula flowers are creamy white, mustard and kale flowers are bright yellow, and broccoli flowers are pale yellow.  The blooms on this radish are pinkish-purple.  

 

Once the radishes go to flower and seed, the roots are too tough to eat, but the flowers and seed pods of the radish are edible.    So when they bloom, we just pick off the flowers and put them in our salad.  Mmm, radishy.

 

 

HAPPY GARDENING!!!

 

This is just one plant of Poblano peppers.  It’s about 5 feet tall, and probably has 20 peppers on it.  

 

I grew it from a seed!!!

 

 

HAPPY GARDENING!!!