Port Potager

Last weekend I was setting the chickens up in their playpen when I came across this guy: I couldn't get him (her?) to open up from this defense posture, but it was easily as big around as my index finger, and curled up it was about the diameter of a half dollar. It has red rings, and, as you can see, a seriously spiky black hairdo. For the first time ever, my favorite  caterpillar identification website  let me down. It told me I was looking at a wooly bear, but I know that's not right. (You can see what I mean by checking out a wooly bear photo here .)  Upon further googling, I found that this caterpillar is very similar to the wooly bear, which grows up to become a tiger moth. But my caterpillar is a Giant Leopard Moth, which is even cooler. Check out this photo from  Wikipedia Commons : That guy is prettier than most butterflies, so I decided not to feed it to the chickens. Not that I could have if I wanted to: Although I expected it to ju...

This weekend has been kind of a bust for making any headway on that  giant pile of dirt in our driveway. Contrary to the weather forecast, it's been kind of a crappy weekend: Without the sun, it's COLD. And dreary. Add to that a Halloween party and a half marathon (I'm happy to put on a costume, but the running is Kirk's thing), and motivation levels for picking up a shovel are pretty low. So the only item of note in the garden this weekend is this guy: Jonas found this "calwapitter" munching on some carrot leaves. A quick Google search led us to a cool caterpillar identification website , which revealed that what we have here is a (future) Black Swallowtail butterfly. According to Wikipedia , the blue ones are female and the yellow ones are male. We also learned that these are otherwise known as Parsnip Swallowtails, because they lay their eggs in plants of that family (which is why we found ours in the carrots). I know I have a history of lar...