Bugs are part of gardening. It’s a fact of life–you will have bugs. There are good bugs and bad bugs, and if you create the right environment, the good bugs can keep the bad bugs at bay.
Today we discovered a few signs of a bug’s life in the garden. We’re hopeful that our garden ecosystem will be kept in check by these guys. It took a little searching to identify them, but we thought we’d share our findings here.
We’d never seen anything like it, and had the instant urge to swipe it off the Loquat tree, where this blob had set up a home. Instead we left it there, and we took the stance that this was a friendly presence rather than a foe. Glad we did.
Up until now we didn’t even know we had Praying Mantises in our garden. I’ve never seen one, but this is proof. Soon we’ll have dozens more! Very exciting.
Other signs of life are appearing in the herb garden:
We witnessed a few Swallowtail butterflies laying eggs on our parsley, but when we went out this morning, we found these critters chowing down on our dill plant. Farewell, dill. It’s been nice knowing you.
Swallowtail caterpillars look a lot like Monarch caterpillars, the difference is Swallowtails have orange dots where the Monarchs have yellow. Speaking on Monarchs…our milkweed is still intact, even though we’ve seen Monarchs laying eggs on both plants. We suspect spiders are carrying away the young caterpillars (saw that with my own eyes last year!) So we patiently await the first sign of life there.
Even though fall is here and winter isn’t far off, a bug’s life goes on in the garden. If you see something creepy or unusual, try to identify it first before taking the garden hose to it. Some of these crazy creatures might be beneficial, or reliant on us for habitat and help.
I think you meant Queen butterfly. Isn’t the swallowtail more looking like bird shit? I had one GS caterpillar that didn’t look like this. It came out to be a beautiful butterfly. Lucky this year. Swallowtail, I think like rue and citrus.
Azucena, thanks for posting your thoughts. I double checked and the black swallowtail actually has a caterpillar that looks like ours. Here’s a link to a photo: http://www.thebutterflysite.com/1-create-butterfly-garden.shtml. Still, I love your description of what those other swallowtail caterpillars look like. So accurate!