Happy Fourth of July!
Who needs sparklers to celebrate, when you have a yard full of fireflies? They begin to rise right before dusk, and light up the yard with their flashes. Better than fireworks, any day! Right now, many of the neighbors are shooting off aerial bursts. I have to wonder if the fireflies are wondering how some of their kind got so high!
There are so many fireworks going off that the air is smokey, like a foggy night, except it has that acrid tang you associate with black powder. We are surrounded by many tall trees, but all of them being lit from behind due to all the fireworks going off. I'm thinking the economy is getting better-- so many people with so many fireworks. T'aint cheap!
While Jack and I were weeding and watering the veggies on Saturday, I found the most beautiful caterpillar on my parsley plant. Hollered at Jack and we watched this mean green eating machine decimate some parsley.
A quick search of the plant revealed two of these caterpillars. Odd. Only two? Somehow you would think where there were one or two there would be more.
Naturally, I had to know what it was, so I googled black and green striped caterpillar. The first thing that came up was a picture of my guy calling it a parsley worm. Well, I guess!
Next I discovered that it turns into a black swallowtail butterfly. Go pupate babies! I looked up black swallowtail and found the male and the female have quite different color variations. Now I have been out every day combing through the plants to keep an eye on the caterpillars.
Another thing I learned was that parsley worms have a defensive structure, called an osmeterium, right behind the head. This structure is usually concealed. However, when disturbed this "Y" shaped organ protrudes and emits a strong odor that is apparently distasteful to predators.
After reading this, there was nothing for it—I had to go annoy the caterpillar. Yep! Very strong odor. And how fun was this? What did you do over the Fourth? Oh, not much, annoyed some caterpillars.
While I find many insects fascinating and I'm happy to just let them be, I do have a James Bond attitude about others. Japanese beetles, for instance are definitely on my Live and Let Die list.
Japanese beetles are really very pretty, they have an iridescent shimmer that turns them bronze in the sun. However, I am hard put to find another common garden bug that wrecks as much devastation in as short a time as these beetles. Over the last several years I have been out in the early morning and early evening knocking them off the plants into a plastic bag. This year I am trying something different. I use a coffee can (one of the new-fangled plastic types with the grip indents) with a couple inches of water in the bottom add a squirt of dish soap, then shake or knock them off the plant into the brew. There is a really big crop of Japanese beetles this year. I will need to be vigilant. As Madeye Moody would say, "Constant vigilance!" In my garden they are particularly fond of loosestrife, evening primrose, hibiscus and roses. That's a lot of territory to cover.
We have been eating from the garden for weeks now. First lettuce, spinach and chard, then summer squash and now sugar snap peas. We even have a couple of tomatoes showing the first blush of color. The beans are starting to form too. We have both purple and yellow wax beans. Good thing Robin is coming to help us eat!
The lettuce in now beginning to bolt so we need to get the next crop in.
Jack is standing at the end of the snap pea row. They are taller than he is, and covered with pods. They make a great snack while weeding and watering. The lower knee-high plants are the yellow wax beans. The purples are on the other side of the peas.
I have mentioned before that where we live in Farmington Hills seems to be surrounded by some weird force field that keeps weather systems away. Time after time, major storms come across lower Michigan, accompanied by the requisite severe storm warnings and we get nothing. Two weeks ago, we had a huge storm that practically washed away downtown Farmington, a mere 3 miles away. We didn't even get a rain drop.
Friday, July 1 was another example. Huge storm, high winds, hail, torrential rain. We heard rolling thunder for over an hour, saw a few lightning bolts but that was it. The next morning we discovered that 150,000 people south of us were without power and that the airport had two inches of rain. Whew. I'm glad we missed it, but it really is strange to watch the radar maps and see the storms split to the north and south of us.
What was interesting about this storm was the sky kept changing color. First it went green. Really green. The kind of eerie green that Jack said if he saw that color sky in Oklahoma it would mean a tornado was coming. About 30 minutes later the sky turned orange. This was during the late afternoon, so don't even think about this color being a sunset orange. The photo I am posting is NOT retouched or color enhanced in any way. It truly was this color. 
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