Dear readers! This morning Ms. Jeannie went grocery shopping in her backyard for the very first time! In just two months, with the help of her greenhouse and a certain sensational lady, Ms. Jeannie’s garden project went from this…
to this…
Isn’t lady nature just marvelous?! With time being so scarce for Ms. Jeannie these past few months, lady nature truly proved to be the greatest of friends. “Don’t worry about your garden Ms. Jeannie – I’ll take care of it!”
And take care, she did! Boy that lady – there’s no stopping her abilities!
Today, the garden was offering a sale on cucumbers…
Ms. Jeannie picked six today, and as you can see there are what seems like a million in all stages still growing growing, growing. Ms. Jeannie could actually hear the cucumber plant say thank you as she plucked the ripe ones. Baby cucumbers moved right into the empty spots. Productive little creatures:)
The cantaloupe melons are in a race with the cucumbers. Who can outgrow their metal frames first?
Everyone is hedging their bets in the garden. The beets are betting on the melons.
The okra is betting on the cucumbers.
And the peas…
well, they are just betting on themselves and their ability to outwit the mammoth sunflowers. They’ve already outgrown their trellis and moved on to the sunflower stalks – so really at this point – the sky is the limit for them! Take that, cucumber melon competition!
Do you remember Ms. Jeannie’s grand plan for her re-purposed gift from the ground? A home for zinnias, ha! Four weeks into that growing project … they looked like gawky teenagers in ill-fitting clothing…
They immediately were sent to summer camp in the herb garden where they could spread out and be as wild and wooly as they wanted…
This suits them just fine!
Speaking of herbs, Ms. Jeannie just recently gave her chives a major haircut for a simple new recipe, which solved two problems at once – what to make for dinner and how to keep these fast growing onions from taking over! She’ll share that culinary feat in her next post – so stay tuned.
In the meantime, Boyo sends his best from the porch…
As you can see he is working just as hard as the ladies:)
The butterflies, dear readers, are born! Here’s their first photo shoot. Each butterfly emerged on a different day so Ms. Jeannie named them appropriately.
Meet Wednesday – the first butterfly…
Brand-new!
Wednesday was the one, if you recall, who chose to cocoon underneath the flower petals of the gerber daisy. A most pretty spot.
Ta-dah!
Here she was stepping out of the cocoon. Ms. Jeannie just missed her actual emergence by sheer minutes. She had just checked on all three of the cocoons (status quo) and had gone around the corner to cut some herbs for dinner. Five minutes later – here was Wednesday fanning out her new wings.
It was a slow-going little journey up the stalk of the flower while she figured out her legs and the tricky business of holding on. But by the time Ms. Jeannie took this aerial view, Wednesday was an expert!
Hello butterfly!
Because Ms. Jeannie had missed the actual moment of Wednesday unzipping the cocoon doors, she was determined to at least catch Wednesday’s first moment of flight on camera. She didn’t how long this would take. So she waited. And she waited.
Ms. Jeannie’s cat, Satchem (incidentally named after a butterfly, herself) even waited with her for awhile.
oh the anticipation…
This gave Ms. Jeannie some time to explain to Satchem that there would indeed be no butterfly dinners in her future. She seemed to understand. Eventually though, she lost interest in the butterflies altogether and fell asleep underneath the tulip tree.
Meanwhile, Wednesday just stayed in her same spot, fanning those wings and taking in her new surroundings.
After 25 minutes of waiting, Ms. Jeannie got side-tracked and went on to other projects – but she came back to check every few minutes. Going into the second hour, Ms. Jeannie came out to check and there was Wednesday on her petal and then in a flash of a second, there she wasn’t.
She flew off into the garden so fast it was all Ms. Jeannie could do to frantically photograph her flying through the air. Unfortunately this is the best photo she got…
First flight!
You can just make out the fuzzy swatches of orange as Wednesday flapped her wings. So long pretty girl!
The next butterfly to emerge was Thursday…
Like Wednesday, Thursday also chose the afternoon hours to emerge – although this little butterfly decided to come out just as the storm clouds started to rumble. The wind picked up considerably, and Ms. Jeannie feared that Thursday would get blown away before he had any sort of chance to get his bearings.
You can see him sort of half-hanging there – it looked perilous for a moment…
But Thursday knew what he was doing. He was being blown about quite a bit – but he para-sailed through the high winds like a champ. Apparently, those stickly little legs are a lot stronger than they look!
Then the rains came – torrential downpours so heavy Ms. Jeannie considered clipping the stalk he was on and bringing it onto the screened porch just to give him a chance to get his act together.
But again, Thursday, adapted. Although this time, he crawled back down to his cocoon and hung onto both the casing and the stalk for extra support.
The rain came down for hours and Thursday hung on. The moment the sun came out, he fanned his wings out a few times and went in search of sunnier skies. Again – Ms. Jeannie managed to grab her camera in time for the first flight – but Thursday was fast – so this is the best she could do…
Only a slight improvement was Wednesday’s photograph!
The next day it was back to full hot Georgia sunshine and Friday decided that this was his day to join his pals. Friday was the one who chose to cocoon behind the wooden spinach sign – in what Ms. Jeannie thought was the most disguised location of the group.
Ms. Jeannie was most curious about this one’s color pattern since he had a different color cocoon than the others. But he turned out just the same!
If Friday picked a shy spot to nest, he certainly wasn’t shy about coming out. He immediately started climbing up the wood spike…
So long cocoon, Friday’s on a mission!He climbed…
…and climbed…
and climbed…
All the way to the top of the sign, he climbed. And then do you know what he did?
He climbed over the other side and gave Ms. Jeannie the most beautiful display…
Ohh…
So handsome and so perfectly balanced, he almost looked fake. Like someone had positioned him there on purpose!
And then, just like the others he was there one minute and off exploring the world the next. This time, Ms. Jeannie was sort of ready – but boy is it hard to capture these little fellas when they are flying!
Definitely, the best of the flight pictures – but no photo awards for Ms. Jeannie on this front:)
So there it is – the tale of the three black swallowtails. Most likely, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday will stay close to the garden enjoying a bevy of summer flowers before finding their own loves and making more swallowtail babies. Ms. Jeannie hasn’t seen them since their birthdays – but she feels like they could be close by. Of course, if she sees any fluttering about the garden, she will photo them for you to see too. Hopefully by that time, she’ll have improved upon those flight photos!
Watching these little guys grow was a completely amazing experience for Ms. Jeannie, packed to the brim with hope and wonder. If you missed the previous posts, read about the beginnings of the butterflies (as caterpillars) here and (cocoons) here.
After carefully cutting, wrapping, storing and dating (January 31st, 2013) her fig cutting as the NewEnglandGardener instructed, Ms. Jeannie was a little disappointed when she checked the clipping a week ago, only to see that nothing happened.
For three weeks the clipping had been tucked inside it’s plastic Ziploc, stored in a warm spot (on a shelf in the stairwell) and left unbothered to grow, grow, grow. But as of last week, the twig still looked exactly the same as when she started. No sprouts, no new green, no shoots. In the NewEngland Gardeners video, he already had sprouts after three weeks, so Ms. Jeannie worried that, perhaps, she had done something wrong and that she may have led her readers down a rocky garden path.
In speaking with a friend of hers about this matter, Ms. Jeannie learned another way that you could grow a fig clipping.
Method 2: Rooting a fig twig in a container of water.
In water! So Ms. Jeannie went out, cut another twig and placed that one in a jar of water and set it on her sill away from the sun.
This morning, she checked the status of both the Ziploc bag and the jar. This would now now be week 4 for the Ziploc bag and week 2 for the jar.
She was delighted to find this in her bag:
After 4 weeks in a ziploc bag!
Look closely and you’ll see a sprout at the very base of the twig…
A sprout!
Yey! Ms. Jeannie must have been a little impatient last week. This is a good reminder that you can’t rush Mother Nature. She is ready, when she’s ready!
The grocery circular that Ms. Jeannie wrapped the twig in is still moist, even though she has never added any more water since the start, and it is a little spotted with mold…
Still damp!
The Ziploc bag also contains condensation…
Condensation bubbles
…so essentially, Ms. Jeannie created her own little greenhouse!
Nothing’s happening with the twig in the jar of water yet, but now Ms. Jeannie knows just to give it time!
So what’s next for the sprouted twig? Well, Ms. Jeannie is going to keep it in the Ziploc for one more week to see if any new shoots will form and then transfer it to a shoe-box size plastic container with potting soil as the NorthernGardener suggested. In the meantime, she’ll keep her eye on the water twig to see what happens.
Until next time, dear readers, grow fearless!
Grow Fearless Art Print by Feed Your Soul Art on Etsy
And don’t forget! You have until midnight tonight to enter to win this photograph (click on the ladies for contest information)…
In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat 