While the milkweed I planted almost all died, spontaneous plants from last year’s seeds have popped up everywhere around the yard.   They, too, have attracted quite a few Queen butterflies and fritillaries.  Below is the stone path with pillars of milkweed growing between as well as sweet alyssum, which, to my surprise, continues to live and flower despite the heat.  I planted them in March, I believe, and I expect them to last through to the frost.

The chives are putting on quite a show of flowers and a buffet for the honeybees, wasps and gray hairstreaks.

I keep the feathered guests happy with daily offerings of seed and fresh water.  The finches and cardinals really love coming by, as well as doves and blackbirds.  And the anoles have their run of the place since the birds are well fed.  They, too, love the sun.

I have started the fall garden in hopes that the weather doesn’t kill off everything.  I have several tomato and pepper plants, as well as a couple rows of bush beans sowed.  I’ll be starting the carrots, spinach and broccoli in the coming month and then lettuce for the winter garden.  I can’t wait for cooler weather…

It’s going to be 109 degrees tomorrow – what I think is our 70th day above 100 degrees and a new all-time record.  The grass looks like hay.  The spring veggie garden is long-perished.   The bare bones of milkweed plants stand in clumps along the fence.  Huge black cracks are forming in the ground, with small sections giving way to darkness below.   It is a terrible sight out there.

cracks in the ground...

Yet the two basil plants I have are loving life. As you can see, they’re bushy and full of aromatic, delectable basil leaves.  There’s enough for us to use fresh throughout the season without worrying about hurting the plants.  In fact, the more we use, the more it grows.  I continue to pick the top leaves off of the plants.  By doing so, I keep the plant from flowering and going to seed.  This ensures that the plant will continue to focus energy on producing more leaves and keeps the oils in the leaves at a higher concentration.  I water this box every few days and the marjoram really prefers the shade offered by the basil bushes.

Filed under: Gardening, Herb Garden, Organic Tagged: basil, drought, Gardening, growing tip, heat, herb, resistant, round rock, texas ]]> http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/basil-loves-texas-heat/feed/ 1 roundrockgarden _DSC0345 _DSC0325 _DSC0076 _DSC0366 http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/its-a-boy/ http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/its-a-boy/#comments Sat, 11 Jun 2011 03:38:37 +0000 roundrockgarden http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/?p=2843 ]]> This beautiful baby boy was born Sunday morning.  After many months of anticipation, I was able to hold him in my arms.  In fact, right after the midwife delivered him, she handed him directly to me.  What a special moment, and what a miracle birth is!  My wife is the strongest person I know, giving birth completely naturally without the use of pain medication or epidural.   You all will be seeing many more photos of this little guy, but here are a few to introduce you.

Meet Obrey Joseph (pronounced o-BRAY):

the bee's tongue is sticking out

Filed under: Beneficial Insects, Butterfly Garden, Flowers, Gardening, Organic, Photography Tagged: austin, Beneficial Insects, butterfly garden, central texas, garden, Gardening, honeybee, indigo spires, round rock, salvia ]]> http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/2794/feed/ 2 roundrockgarden _DSC0018 _DSC0041 _DSC0047 _DSC0048 _DSC0059 _DSC0062 http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/thinking-small/ http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/thinking-small/#comments Thu, 26 May 2011 15:54:07 +0000 roundrockgarden http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/?p=2784 ]]> If I spend any amount of time in the garden, I soon discover some sort of creeping, crawling creature.  Since I was a little boy, I’ve been fascinated with bugs and insects.  I would often turn over the large, landscaping rocks in my mother’s flower beds to discovery what lurked underneath.  When my brother and I would trek through the woods, I spent a good amount of time looking for new bugs, turning over limbs and even breaking apart rotting logs to find them.  Most of these bugs aren’t harmful to my garden plants at all, but serve a purpose in the complex web of life.  Take the green stink bug, for example.

(click photos to view larger images)

This little nymph was discovered hanging onto the Whirling Butterfly gaura.  It wasn’t causing any damage, seemingly content just to “hang out”.  I picked it up and handled it for some time, and luckily it didn’t spray me with its characteristically bad-smelling chemical.  Perhaps it hasn’t matured enough yet.  At this size, I’m sure this bug provides a good snack for the green anoles or perhaps a member of the spider family.

Lurking nearby, I found this little striped wolf spider.  This species can grow quite large and love to terrorize my wife and daughter by their mere presence.  Whenever they show up in unexpected places, they are met by a scream and usually an, “Oh my God!  JOE!”  That’s code for, “There’s a large, ugly bug that you need to get rid of!”  Most of the time, I enter the room to find a small, frightened little spider, which I quickly scoop up in my hands and transfer outside.  Although wolf spiders are known to bite humans, I’ve never had one that I’ve handled do so.  I’m always careful to hold them loosely, though.

Spiders are fascinating!  We used to have a good number of garden spiders when I was growing up.  I would literally spend an afternoon hunting grasshoppers, crickets and moths to throw into their large webs.  I loved to watch this particular spider move with lightning speed to the struggling insect and begin wrapping it in a thick strand of silk that streamed from the spider’s abdomen.  The insect would struggle for awhile, but once it was completely wrapped, the spider would move in for its paralyzing bite, then all movement would stop.  I think the spider appreciated my help, but it made no qualms about telling me when I got too close.  It would run to the center of the web and begin bouncing the entire web back and forth violently to warn me to stay away!

The wolf spider is much different from the garden spider, however.  Instead of weaving a web, it hunts its prey freely.  This particular spider was found in the foliage of some flowers, no doubt waiting for an insect to come and dine on nectar – quite possibly its last meal.  I’ve seen wolf spiders dragging their meals with them as they go, a difficult task when the prey is equal to or larger in size than the spider itself.

Because spiders prey upon a variety of insect pests, I consider them beneficial insects in my garden AND my home.  I’ll have to add this one to my Beneficial Insect Files.

The rest of the vegetable garden is coming along nicely.  I have over a couple dozen tomatoes forming, and lots of bell peppers, habaneros and jalapenos as well.

The cantaloupe is really taking to the trellis I built a few weeks ago.  I already have a few fruit starting to form, too!

Zucchini (left) and tomato plant (right)

Zucchini, foreground, and cantaloupe on the trellis

Cantaloupe!

the melon is resting nicely on two pieces of nylon cord

umbrels of parsley flowers

My wife, who is understandably a little alarmed by the number of bees and wasps by our back door (she’s allergic to their stings), asked me why we want so many wasps in the garden.  She understands that parsley is the host plant for Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillars and can appreciate the beauty that adult butterflies bring to the garden, but wasps are an entirely different story in her book.  I explained to her that wasps are beneficial insects to gardeners.  She then asked me, “In what way are they beneficial?”  To her, they seem like a pest to avoid and not one to invite so freely into the garden.

The fact of the matter is that wasps are beneficial insects in the garden for two main reasons.  The first is that they are pollinators.  I find wasps on a number of flowering plants in the garden, including squash, cucumber, zucchini and melons.  This family of plants, called cucurbits, have unisexual flowers, meaning that each flower either contains anthers or ovaries (i.e. is male or female), but not both.  They cannot self-pollinate.  Pollinators such as butterflies, bees and wasps are drawn to the flowers of these plants by color and are enticed to stay by the nectar that the flowers offer.   As they lap up the sweet goodness, the flower’s pollen sticks to the legs and bodies of the pollinator, which then flies to another flower and deposits some of this pollen there.  With regards to cucurbits, the male and female flowers need pollen from one another in order to produce fruit.  Pollinators are the key to making this happen as they move from male flower to female flower, depositing pollen.

Wasps are beneficial in another way.  They are parasitic.  They feed on a number of garden pests, including flies, beetle larvae and even caterpillars.  To me, this is where wasps fall into a sort of gray area when you are butterfly gardening.  Naturally, a butterfly gardener wants to raise butterfly larvae to adulthood, but other creatures in the garden see butterfly larvae as a good meal.  So, there’s a catch-22 here.  A butterfly gardener grows plants that attract beneficial insects, and some of those beneficial insects end up killing one another.  Wasps do their part, however, since out-of-control caterpillar populations can decimate plants and crops.  Still, I cringe at the thought of my little caterpillars preyed upon by wasps and even birds.  It is nature, however, and everything exists in balance, so I have to let the natural process play out.  All things considered, wasps are beneficial to my garden – I just wish they preyed exclusively on beetle larvae!

The Paper Wasp

If you’ve ever seen a wasp nest in the shape of an umbrella hanging from a thin thread under the eaves of a house, then you’ve seen how paper wasps live and how they got their name.  Paper wasps gather fibers from plants, chewing and mixing them with saliva to form a substance similar to paper, which is then formed into nests with many adjoining hexagonal cells.

Nests are started by a single queen in the spring, which can grow to hold up to two hundred cells.  The queen overwinters in brush or wood piles and emerges in the spring to expand her kingdom.  After picking a suitable spot for a nest, she works tirelessly, gathering and chewing plant fibers and forming the first several cells.   In these cells, the queen lays her eggs, which hatch into worker (non-queen females) and male larvae.  As the brood grows, the queen continues to do most of the egg-laying and studies show that her behavior actually suppresses the ovarian functions in subsequent female wasps so that she remains the dominant female.  Workers care for the queen’s larvae and continue to build the nest, while also visiting the field to harvest nectar, plant fibers and insects for larval food.

Adult wasps do not eat insects, they subsist entirely upon nectar.  Workers collect caterpillars and carry them back to their nests, first stinging them to paralyze them.  Then they stuff the paralyzed caterpillar into one of the prepared cells, and the queen deposits a single egg on the caterpillar’s body.  The egg hatches and a tiny wasp larva emerges and finds all the food it could possibly need until it pupates and emerges as an adult, winged wasp.

Males are needed only for fertilization of the queen.  The queen has a specialized organ called the spermatheca, which captures and holds the male wasp’s sperm for later fertilization of eggs.  Males typically live short lives.  Late in the season, they mate with female offspring of the queen, which then leave the colony to overwinter and emerge in spring to start their own colony.  All other members of the colony, including the original queen, perish during the winter.  The newly mated female holds the sperm in her spermatheca until the following spring when she begins laying eggs on harvested caterpillars!

As far as hierarchy in the colony goes, the founding queen is generally the dominant queen, and rules over her workers to ensure their cooperation and subservience.  The most aggressive females will take up the role of queen should the founding queen die, and on rare occasions, aggressive females can root out the founding queen in a process called usurpation.  The aggressive female then takes over as queen, while the founding queen takes on the role of worker.  Despite this aggressiveness, paper wasps are not aggressive except in defense of their nests.  As I tell my wife, they won’t even bother you should you sit right next to the parsley flowers to watch them.  They are more interested in feeding than they are in you!

The photos below are of a red paper wasp (Polistes carolina) on parsley flowers.  This wasp is common from as far west as the Texas panhandle to the east coast up through New York.  They are quite large at an inch in length.

(Click on any photo to view larger)

Filed under: Beneficial Insects, Gardening, Organic, Photography Tagged: austin, beneficial insect files, Beneficial Insects, central texas, flower, Gardening, paper wasp, parsley, pests, round rock ]]> http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/beneficial-insect-spotlight-paper-wasp/feed/ 3 roundrockgarden parsley flower _DSC0495.sm _DSC0491.sm _DSC0478.sm _DSC0473.sm _DSC0500.sm http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/macro-monday-5-9-11/ http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/macro-monday-5-9-11/#comments Mon, 09 May 2011 14:39:15 +0000 roundrockgarden http://roundrockgarden.wordpress.com/?p=2690 ]]> Here are a few selections for this week’s Macro Monday meme.  For more Macro Monday photos, click on the link at the bottom of the page:

Argiope trifasciata a.k.a. banded garden spider

lady beetle on gaura stem

bumble bee on Indigo Spires

Fall aster in spring

crab spider inside zucchini flower

The perennial hibiscus is really bushing out and I suspect that, some time in May, it will begin flowering.  This variety has fluorescent fuschia blooms, which will bring additional color to the side of the house and is sure to captivate the attention of beneficial insects.  This is between our deep red-colored knockout rose bush, which is starting another wave of blooms, and the herb garden.

perennial hibiscus

The fall aster looks as if it is going to grace us with a pre-fall show this spring.  It is growing some flower buds as we speak, which will add a nice lavender splash between the orange and yellow lantana blooms.  It will continue to grow throughout the summer and put on its big finale in the fall.  It promises to be a good show.

fall aster preparing to bloom ... in spring!

In this photo, fennel flanks three dill plants at the very left side of the bed against the fence.  Surprisingly, the black swallowtails have been quiet the last few weeks after an early start of laying eggs and hatching baby caterpillars.  I don’t currently have a single egg or caterpillar on the hosts plants.  I’m hoping the rain will bring them back.  I mean, I have a total of twelve host plants for them!  Ding-ding goes the dinner bell!!

The three mounds of leaves on the right are black-eyed susans, which still have a little time before they’re in bloom.  At the back of the bed are my thyme plants that are finishing up their blooming stage.  I’ll shear them back when they’re done and encourage them to send up some new growth.

Texas lantana blooms

As a last minute decision, I sowed more Russian Mammoth sunflower seeds (I had four growing last year).  I had twelve come up, but some little creature ate two of them completely to the soil.  I still have nine going strong and another struggling a bit.   The six plants in the foreground below were planted at the same time as the others, but are already much larger than the other four.

Russian Mammoth sunflowers

The sedum wilts slightly in the heat of the day and rebounds by morning.  It seems to catch a lot of falling moisture as seen by these big balls of water.  I think I may need to shade them a little better.  They’re in the same bed as the Turk’s Cap, which enjoys partial shade.  The corner WAS in the shade when I planted them last fall, but the neighbors severely pruned the Texas Lilac tree that used to shade them.

water droplets on sedum leaves

Turk's Cap budding

It’s a challenge to photograph the honeybees on the gauras.   They move quickly from flower to flower, and the entire flower stalk sways so easily in the breeze.  These two photos came out fairly sharp, however.

Indigo Spires salvia barely lets on that it died back to the ground over winter.  These foot-long spires of flowers are everywhere and more are on their way.  In the second photo, the white Autumn Sage can be seen in the background, as well as the yellow blooms of Zexmenia.

The scissor-tailed flycatcher is Oklahoma’s state bird, but still calls the neighbor’s Mulberry tree its home.   Also known as the Texas Bird of Paradise, it is common in our area.   It is a beautiful bird, but I suspect it is the reason why I haven’t seen many butterflies and why the black swallowtail caterpillars disappeared.    It eats berries, grasshoppers, crickets, butterflies, moths and caterpillars.  I sure hope it got the squash borer bug, too.  Here it sits in the top of another neighbor’s tree at sunset.

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher ... and butterfly eater!

I thought I’d share some of the garden with you today.   Tomorrow, I’ll share a little bit more.  There’s just too much to write about and photos to share to put it all in one post!

Starting at the veggie bed, the continued growth is easy to see.  The cantaloupe is working its way up the trellis I made a week and a half ago.  Every morning, a new batch of bright yellow flowers open up, which brings in the bees and wasps.  If you can believe it, all of these vines (except for the little bit on the far left of the photograph – that is cucumber) are from one cantaloupe plant.  I’m having a hard time believing it myself!

the cantaloupe a week and a half ago

cantaloupe trellis Sunday - click to enlarge

Walking around the corner of the house to the back door, the few flagstones I put by the back stoop have sweet alyssum and yellow thyme between them.  The dainty white flowers just keep going and going.  I’m not sure how long alyssum will last in the coming months, but they make a lovely addition to the garden – one that the bees really like.  The stones keep us from trampling the grass and making a dirty/muddy mess.  If I had my way, I’d put a lot more down and maybe add some stepping stones, too, around the yard.

flagstones and alyssum - click to enlarge

sweet alyssum - click to enlarge

Right past the back stoop, the herb garden is overflowing with chives, oregano and parsley.  If you look really closely, you can even see some thyme sticking out between the chives.  In the pot on the right is some spearmint and the pot on the left, against the wall, is peppermint.  In the other pot on the left, I have stevia growing.  I take a leaf of peppermint and a small piece of stevia and chew them together for a peppermint candy-tasting treat.  They are wonderful steeped together in tea and do not require any sugar.  In fact, as I write this, I have a little indigestion and that sounds like a great calming tonic.

herb garden 5/1/11 - click to enlarge

The parsley is over three feet tall and blooming crazily.  It attracts myriad flying insects including flies, wasps, bees, yellow jackets and more.  They all love its sweet nectar, which is why I leave it there.  The black swallowtails do not seem very interested in it so far this year.

parsley flowering - click to enlarge

The Greek oregano is standing about 18″ tall now and the first flower clusters have started to open.  They will also be a welcome treat for winged friends of the garden.  I’ll let them flower until they’ve had enough, then trim them back to within several inches of the ground.  Oregano leaves are great when dried – even stronger than fresh – so I’ll be sure to hang the leaves to dry and bottle them for later use.

Greek oregano flowering - click to enlarge

Last year, I had only three chive plants and I used them so much that they really didn’t get very big.  This year, I decided to plant six of them.  I still use them regularly, but they are so prolific that they far surpass my needs!  They do, however, make a nice border and I should send up bright pink flowers as we get further into the warmer months.  I’m anxious about that.  The flying insects really love chive blossoms, and they’re also wonderful to eat.  I’m going to make chive blossom vinegar with some of them when the time is right and I’ll be sure to share that with my readers on the blog.  Suffice it to say for now that the wonderful pink color of the blossoms bleeds out into the vinegar and imparts its characteristically mild, garlicky-onion flavor.   This is a great base to make homemade dressing or as a splash of flavor in chicken marinades.

garlic chives - click to enlarge

stevia (a.k.a. sweet leaf) - click to enlarge

The rosemary bushes are getting so big.  Now that the farmer’s market is going here in Round Rock, maybe I should trim them back and share some with the community.  There really is so much to go around!  It is such an easy plant to maintain, it grows year round and is one of my favorite herbs for flavoring!   Pictured here is the prostrate rosemary bush, not the typical variety for cooking … the one I use for cooking is the Tuscan Blue cultivar (rosemary officinalis).  The rosemary bushes are part of my herb garden, but I have them planted right in the middle of the butterfly garden.  Where they’re located, the wind constantly whips through them, stirring up the delightful smell of rosemary and wafts it through the yard.

prostrate rosemary - click to enlarge

Come back to the garden tomorrow for updates on the butterfly garden!

Then, on Sunday, I awoke to find the same zucchini had grown almost two inches to the size of a large dinner plate!

Well, that’s the big news.  Hey, I relish in good news, whatever it is!

Now for the mini-veggie photos!  We have tomatoes, habaneros, green bell peppers, cucumbers, yellow squash, jalapenos and what looks like cantaloupe starting to form!

baby cucumber (tied with nylon cord to tomato cage)

teeny jalapeno

small Early Girl tomatoes clustered together

healthy nub of a habanero pepper

tiny yellow squash (foil to deter vine borer)

beginning of bell pepper

could it be? a cantaloupe fruit?

All of these plants received a healthy watering on Saturday, followed by a 12 oz. cup of freshly brewed compost tea to top them off!  Here is the yeasty smelling, foamy, frothy mixture right before I served it up!