Wildlife Wednesday – camouflaged caterpillar, sphinx moth & trapdoor spider

I was tending to my marigolds when I saw tiny petals moving around a bloom. You don’t usually see that type of activity in a marigold, so I watched it for a few minutes. I discovered that it was a caterpillar that had used marigold petals to camouflage itself. I got such a chuckle from see it.

One evening just after sunset, we were sitting on the back-porch. I saw what I thought was a hummingbird flying around and feeding on my daylilies. I commented to my husband that the hummingbird sure was up late and I’d never seen one fly after dark. He agreed.
I got my camera and tried to focus in on it and take a couple photos. Only one turned out pretty good and it wasn’t a hummingbird, it was a huge moth. Wow, if you know how big a daylily bloom is then you can kind of tell that this moth was quite large.
I looked on the internet and as best as I can tell, it’s some sort of a sphinx moth.

Last weekend, our mower’s drive belt broke. My husband used a leaf blower to clean the mower out before he started work on it to replace the belt. He called out for me to come and see the spider that had fell out of the hood. I hurried over and was surprised to see one of the biggest trapdoor spiders that I’ve ever seen. Its body was at least 3 cm long (a bit over an inch). With its legs it was even bigger and scarier.
I clicked off a photo of the trapdoor spider before my husband properly dispatched it.
I’ve decided not to post the trapdoor spider photo in this post out of respect to people who may be unsettled by seeing it. Instead, I’ve made a link to the photo. If you would like to see the scary creeper Click Here a photo should open in a separate tab or window (if I linked it right.)

It can be amusing, interesting and/or unsettling to notice some of the buglife that I don’t usually pay attention too. I’m glad my camera is usually with me so I can get photos to help me in internet searches to better identify them.

Have you seen any amusing, interesting or scary critters lately?

I hope your Wednesday is pest free and a good one.

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Rosemary won’t bug me anymore

rosemary1My husband and I have been busy shopping for garden plants. We decided to keep it fairly simple this year. A few tomato plants and too many marigolds, too many petunias and some hostas.

We saw a lot of potted herbs. My husband’s suggested I buy some basil since I grow it every year in pots on our back porch. It has a nice aroma when the wind blows or I trim it to cook with it.
I told him no, that I prefer to grow my own since I already bought 3 different varieties of basil seeds: sweet, cinnamon and lemon. I’ve never heard of lemon or cinnamon basil until this year. I’m looking forward to tasting them.

We saw pots of rosemary at a few different places setting outside in the open air. My husband asked me if I knew anything about rosemary? I told him that I’d heard of rosemary chicken recipes but that’s the extent of my knowledge. He said that we should buy some rosemary and try it.

rosemary2I agreed, but I chose to buy a potted rosemary plant in the produce department of our local grocery store so I wouldn’t have to worry about hidden bugs that might get loose in my kitchen. The directions on it’s packaging said to set the potted rosemary in a sunny window. My kitchen doesn’t have a very sunny window, so I decided to it needs to spend days on the back porch. The pot it was in was quite small so I re-potted it in a little blue pot that my son gave me many years ago.

rosemary3I wanted to set the rosemary outside, but once again I ran into the same bug phobia issue as the nursery open air potted ones. Unlike basil which has large leaves that you can see bugs, Rosemary has small tines brush type leaves/stems and it’d be easy for bugs to hide in it. I decided to make a cover for the rosemary out of netting. I took some netting and folded it in half and hand-stitched the sides together making it into a bag. I carefully slipped in over the plant and pot. Now It can sit in on the porch to get sun and be protected from most bugs.

I’m going to wait until the rosemary grows some before I use it. I’ve ran a search to see what rosemary taste like, Most sites say it taste like pine. It doesn’t sound appetizing, but it might be quite good. After we try it, if we don’t like it, I won’t cook with it anymore. I’ll plant it outside by-the-gate and let it grow.

Have you ever tried the herb rosemary?
Do you have a favorite recipe using the herb rosemary?

Here’s wishing you all a lovely week!
gardening

edited in:
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 I added 4 shish-kabob sticks to my rosemary pot because it needs a bit of protection from the netting rubbing up against it when the wind blows.
🙂
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