more backyard wildlife

The bees and butterflies and hummingbirds are nutty about my back corner - tall yellow agastache, obedience, 'Tina James' primrose, and silphium, a.k.a. cup plant, must have some magical allure...
The sky was clear summer Michigan blue on Sunday when I took this shot - something to remember come dull overcast Michigan February. Everything to its season.

No tale to tell, just a photo. Remember, click the photo to enlarge it. But do you dare... who wants bigger spiders?!


And I see this little gal out in the side yard quite often... she's camouflaged pretty well in this sedum.

backyard wildlife

Remember (link) the praying mantis egg cases I set out in the spring? One of my babies showed up today while I was trimming a lavender...
I heard a little voice crying "mommy!" (not really). Anyway, remember, if you click on a photo you can get a bigger version of it.



And here is another critter I saw in some mulch under a spruce tree yesterday...


Blog-housekeeping notes:

This is cool! Right after I embedded my little HGTV (Herb Garden Television -Haha!)gadget into my template so my videos will always be on the main page (see WAY below), Blogger has decided to make uploading videos straight from my computer available. Great minds (eh?) thinking alike, right? Now I wish I could figure out how to add Powerpoint presentations to the blog, because I have a couple good'uns.
I've Googled advice on how to do it, but it is either too time consuming or expensive, depending on the method. If anyone sees a blog with a powerpoint on it, let me know?

I added some newspaper articles about the Detroit Urban Farm and Garden Tour here. These articles take up a lot of space, but the information is important, and some other website/blogs have linked to it, so I thought interested readers deserved to know more.

praying mantis

At our last Backyard Herbalist class, one of my students gave me a bag of praying mantis egg cases... the praying mantis has a long Latin name just like plants do... Tenodera aridifolia sinensis. They are carnivorous insects that will feed on almost any other insect they can overcome, including their own kind.


The case is a mass of hardened foam containing from 50 to 400 eggs, that the female secreted on twigs in late summer or autumn.


Purchased cases can be kept in a jar in the refrigerator until you want to release them in the spring. Attach the egg case to a stem a few feet off the ground.


I can have fun observing this case for signs of a hatch while I work on cleaning up the flower bed this weekend. Actually, the case doesn't change in appearance once the young hatch, and it may take up to 8 weeks, but I'll be around and looking for these interesting "pet bugs."