It’s that time of year again! The time when I start to think about one of my favorite creepy-crawlies that some of us love to hate – spiders!
We see them all over the place this time of year. Little plastic ones hung in synthetic fiber webbing stretched all over our neighbor’s bushes. Tiny plastic rings stuck in the orange icing of Halloween themed cupcakes. All sorts of larger ones hanging from strings or climbing people’s houses. Huge inflatable ones on the roofs of houses in our neighborhoods with webs made of rope they must have climbed to get there from the front yard. Heck, there are even big plastic spider skeletons! (What are THOSE supposed to be? Spiders arachnids and they have exoskeletons! They don’t have any internal bones!)
Really??? I mean it’s definitely creepy, but scientifically and factually inaccurate!
There’s no denying that spiders can be a bit creepy. All those legs. All those eyes. The webs they build to catch their prey – sometimes in the middle of the woods where I run into them while hiking which does still freak me out a little. Sometimes in our homes high up in the corners of rooms where mom might have to dust to remove them or dad might have to go on a seek and destroy mission if someone is still home in that web.
Anyway, if you look at the cartoon at the beginning of this post, you’ll see how the two spiders are planning to catch a person to eat at the end of that slide…
This cartoon reminded me of an article about two European biologists who did a scientific estimate of how much all the world’s spiders eat by weight…. And then compared it to the estimated weight of all the human beings on the planet…
I love this article. There are so many facts about spiders in it! It also talks about how important spiders are for us since they eat so many insects keeping populations of insects in check.
That said, read it at your own risk! If spiders creep you out, it might be one to skip. Fair warning – there are a few animations of spiders on the web page where you can find the article…
Back on September 20 I was surprised to see a medium sized brown butterfly flitting around right in front of me when I walked out of my portable door. It didn’t stay long and flew off to a safe distance once I stepped out onto the porch, but when I returned from my run to the main school building, it was back.
I realized that it was coming back over and over to land on the vines I’d grown up the railing of my portable steps.
The vines growing on my portable are hops. Hops is a plant with a few uses, but my main purpose for growing it is to attract a certain butterfly called the Red Admiral to lay eggs on it. Red Admirals are close relatives of the American Painted Lady butterflies that our 2nd graders hatch out every spring during their life cycle studies in science. You probably see lots of Painted Ladies in flower gardens around Lexington in the late summer and fall since their host plants are all in the mallow family. Marshmallow, hollyhock, and other related mallow plants are sometimes kept in people’s gardens which means the female Painted Ladies show up to lay eggs in these gardens.
Red Admirals, however, use nettle plants as the host plant for their caterpillar. Nettles usually grow in shaded, damp areas near rivers or streams and they don’t get flowers, so most gardeners don’t grow them.
The Red Admiral butterfly.
Since I have lived in South Carolina, I have only seen maybe 8 of these beautiful butterflies. Most of the time I see them while I am fishing in the Saluda River near the shore. The only time I’ve seen one away from the river has been while visiting Gardener’s Outpost, a small plant shop in Columbia. The owner, Randal Isherwood and I were talking about the hops vine he had for sale and he mentioned that his vine had a spiky caterpillar feeding on it. I told him that it might be a Red Admiral caterpillar and, as if it had heard us talking about it, an adult Red Admiral butterfly flew right over our heads!
But the butterfly that I saw in front of my portable was not a Red Admiral! It was a very fast flying butterfly, so I had to watch it carefully to identify it, but when it landed and I saw the outside of its wings, I knew exactly what it was…. A Comma!
Comma???
OR WAS IT?!?!?
I am just now as I write this realizing that I had not looked carefully at this picture when I first saw it! Looking closer at the zoomed in picture of this mama butterfly, I just noticed that the white mark on its outer wing is NOT a comma! It is very clearly a related butterfly – the Question Mark!
The lesson here is that when you’re trying to identify something in nature, you have to take your time and observe carefully. Use all the resources you have – web sites, books, talking to experts and showing pictures to them…
Just now I found this guide to telling the difference between a Comma Butterfly and a Question Mark Butterfly. Comparing these pictures to the one of our butterfly, it looks like we have a Question Mark, but that’s not enough for me to say for sure that is what it is. I’ll try to get a clear picture of the inside of the wings to check the spot pattern now to confirm that it is a Question Mark.
And here are two zoomed in cropped pictures showing the inside of the wings of our mama butterfly.
I think it’s pretty clear that we have a Question Mark, not a Comma. The three dark spots on the forewing are followed by the “elongated dash” – almost like a flat oval above the third dot. And the shape of the wings on our butterfly matches the shape of the Question Mark better too!
Well, now that we know what we are looking at, let’s confirm that Question Marks use Hops vine as a host plant.
And sure enough the North Carolina State Agricultural Extension web site lists Hops as one of the Question Mark’s host plants! Check out that information and lots more here!
I would say that we can be certain now that our caterpillars are going to be Question Mark Butterflies. Let’s watch some of the videos and see some of the pictures I took of our mama Question Mark and her eggs and babies!
This summer we grew Pineapple Ground Cherries from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and found that they were much bigger and sweeter than the standard variety – Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherry. Unlike Aunt Molly’s, all of the berries seemed to ripen fully and they really did seem to have a pineapple-like flavor.
No matter what variety of ground cherry you grow in your garden next summer, it’s sometimes hard to know what to do with them besides just snacking on them fresh right off the plant.
There is an excellent recipe for ground cherry salsa, but it calls for using 1/2 cherry tomatoes and 1/2 ground cherries. What can you do if all you have is ground cherries? Make a ground cherry pie!
Use this recipe which only calls for a pie shell, white sugar, brown sugar, butter, ground cherries, and water, and in a little over an hour you will have a sweet, gooey pie made with fruit right out of the garden!
Here are some pictures of each step in making a ground cherry pie that I took this summer.
The pie shell was pre-baked. I also had to take the husk off of all the ground cherries and wash them first. That is probably the part that took the most time. Mixing the flour and brown sugar to sprinkle over the berries. The flour/brown sugar mixture has been sprinkled over the berries.Water has been sprinkled over the berries and flour/brown sugar mixture.3 tablespoons each of white sugar and flour are combined with 2 tablespoons of butter to make a crumb.Crumb on top and being put into a 425 degree oven for 40 minutes. The finished pie! Let it cool before eating!
Flying saucers morning glories are some of my favorite vining flowers. They climb up trellises or porch railings and bloom with big streaked white and light blue flowers in late summer. I used to have them growing on the awning of my portable at Carolina Springs and everyone would stop and look at them when they walked by.
This year Sinclair and I planted one in the pollinator garden so it would grow up the metal owl sculpture. I thought it would look great with a few vines and blue flowers on the owl…
May 18th. It was raining lightly the day we planted the morning glory – perfect conditions for getting a small plant off to a good start!Planted and fertilizer with 1/2 strength Miracle Gro Nature’s Care organic fertilizer.
The vine rooted well, but seemed slow to start.
By May 23 it was already climbing the metal stake.
Over the course of the summer this plant managed to hold on in the heat and got bushier. It was attacked by yellow aphids many times and wilted a lot in the dry spells.
Since it has gotten cooler, the plant has gotten bushier. It covered the owl at the top of the metal stake completely and looked like some kind of sea monster or Cousin It from tye Addam’s Family. Then the stake bent all the way over under the weight of the vines!
But one thing it did not do all summer is bloom!
I was very tempted to give up and rip this plant out of the ground…. Until this week.
On Thursday afternoon I finally noticed 3 big, beautiful flowers on our flying saucers morning glory vines!
The plant is now on the ground, but it has a lot of flower buds and should produce a lot more flowers and seeds for us.
What lessons did I learn from this?
Well, I know that aphids attack plants that grow too fast because they have too much nitrogen fertilizer. I don’t think I gave this plant too much fertilizer over the summer, so I’m going to assume that the soil in the area where it is planted is very heigh in nitrogen. That would make sense considering how fast the weeds seem to grow in that area.
I learned that morning glories need more support than one thin metal stake. When we plant these next year we will be sure to grow them on a fence or sturdy trellis.
And I also learned a lesson that gardening teaches us over and over again no matter how old we are or how long we have been gardening…. Patience.
If I had pulled that vine out of the ground, we would never have seen these beautiful flowers! (And I expect to see many more now that the plant has started blooming!)
At our garden club meeting at the end of August we were getting ready to plant our brassica seeds, but after we got the supplies from Sr. Frank’s car, we harvested and ate some okra.
There are six varieties of okra growing in the school garden this year. Eagle Pass, Burgundy, Puerto Rican Everblush, Jade, Moody Family, and Texas Hill Country. We love them all!
Burgundy is a tall plant that produces long pods. The pods grow quickly and often stay tender even when 5-6” long.
Our Jade Okra is very tender and tasty, but has taken a bit longer than the other plants to start producing. The pods are smaller too. I mention the Campbell’s Soup company in one of the videos that follows as having developed this variety of Okra in the 1950’s for use in their soups. This was a mistake. It was actually a variety called Emerald that Campbell’s developed and had farmers grow for use in their canned gumbos.
Nowadays Campbells doesn’t make canned gumbo since it’s not as popular as their other soups. The Emerald Okra variety is still around though. We might have to find seeds and try that one next year.
Moody Family Okra is a newly released heirloom variety sold by Sistah Seeds, a new seed company that specializes in traditional African-American heirloom vegetable varieties. This plant is short and stocky with large leaves and dark yellow flowers. The Pods are also short and thick and they stay tender longer than many other varieties. The stems of the plant are red and the pods have reddish pink tips and can sometimes be half red along their length.
According to the Sistah Seeds web site, the Moody Family for whom this okra is named brought this seed with them from West Africa and have been growing it since at least as far back as the 1830’s. It seems like a good producer and a good plant for small gardens and containers.
The okra plants in the pictures above are a variety called Texas Hill Country. We got the seeds for this variety from Chris Wormley of Satchel Ford Elementary School in Columbia. This variety of okra has been a great producer for Mr. Wormley, and it did really well for us as well. It is very similar to the Moody Family Okra in that the pods are short and thick, and Annabeth and they don’t get tough fast. It is somewhat different from the Moody Family Okra since the plants grow larger, and it seems to produce more pods earlier in the season. I have heard this, referred to as a “snapping okra” because the pods can be snapped off the plant by hand and don’t require the use of clippers to remove them from the stalk. We will definitely plant this variety in the future and might try growing it alongside a third large-podded, very productive snapping okra called Beck’s Big Buck next year.
This okra is a candlestick variety called Puerto Rico Everblush. Candlestick varieties of okra produce smooth, thin, rounded pods that stay tender even when they are upwards of 6 inches long. This variety is one that was produced by Chris Smith, the founder of The Utopian Seed Project and author of the James Beard Award winning book The Whole Okra.
Chris is originally from Great Britain, but fell in love with okra around the same time he fell in love with his wife who he met in Greenville, SC on a visit to the United States. He worked for Sow True Seeds in Asheville, NC for a few years and quickly became interested in growing different varieties of vegetable plants together so that their genetics would cross and possibly create new variations.
Through The Utopian Seed Project Chris recruits small organic farmers, community and school gardeners, and backyard gardeners to help him grow more of the vegetables he is trying to cross than he could grow on his own. He asks people to grow the seeds in isolation to keep pollen from other related plants away and then asks them to share some of the seeds their vegetable plants produce at the end of the season so that he can cross their resulting seeds with others he collects from other farmers and gardeners across the country.
Usually Chris is looking for people to share seeds from plants with specific traits. For example, he might ask people to send him seeds from the most colorful kale they grow from his kale seeds or only from the kale plants that survived very cold temperatures in far northern states.
His first project was the Whidby White Okra Project. In that project Chris gave 800 participants around 100 white okra seeds each and asked them to grow them all and rate each okra plant’s pod color when they started producing. He then asked everyone to put a mesh bag over one flower on their plant that produced the whitest pods so that the bees couldn’t pollinate that one flower. The pod that grew from that flower was to be dried and sent back to Chris since it would have self-pollinated and it’s seeds would grow plants that also had pale white pods. Chris is now in the process of growing plants from those seeds year after year hoping to recreate a stable genetic variety of okra that produces pale white pods.
But Puerto Rico Everblush is Chris’ own variety. It is the result of Chris growing 78 varieties of okra in the same field back in 2018. He knows that one of the parent plants was a variety called Puerto Rico Evergreen, a type of okra that was developed in Puerto Rico with an exceptional flavor. He can’t be sure what gave the pods their reddish pink coloration on one side though.
This Okra has been a decent producer, but not as productive as some of our others. It seems slow to start growing pods as well and it’s a relatively tall plant.
Our final okra variety is something of a mystery. These plants were grown from seeds taken from pods grown on plants that were donated to the school garden at the charter school I worked at back in 2019. I had asked for okra plants from fellow gardeners on Facebook, and a lady stepped up and told me she could give me a dozen of her small plants. I was a little skeptical, because okra is supposed to be hard to transplant, but she arrived at the school with a bucket containing 10 or 12 one foot tall okra plants and I put them in the ground the very next day. Those plants thrived and ended up growing over 10 feet tall producing lots and lots of pods well into November. They were the first okra plants I had ever grown, and the flavor of those pods was amazing!
That year, those okra plants grew at least 8 feet tall, but in our garden, they have grown to about 4 feet this year. as you can see from the picture, though, they were as productive as ever!
I vaguely remember, the lady referring to a variety called Eagle Pass when she described them to me. I have looked up that variety of okra, and the description seems to match these plants. They are a medium size, highly productive, green okra with excellent flavor.They are a medium size, highly productive, green okra with excellent flavor.
I may never know the actual name of that variety of okra, but I know that is a variety that I will grow for years to come because it is always one of my strongest, most reliable plants, and one of my best producers. It also has a special place in my heart, because it reminds me of the generosity of my fellow gardeners!
The Mother of a Thousands’ scientific name is Kalanchoe Daigremontiana.
Mother of a Thousands’ common names are devil’s backbone, Mexican hat plant, or alligator plant.
Mother of a Thousands are native to Southwestern Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa.
Because Mother of thousands are native to Madagascar, it prefers tropical temperatures.
Mother of thousands are perennial plants in their native range. Here in the US they are considered houseplants everywhere except in places like Florida, Texas, the desert Southwest, or Hawaii.
These plants can get about 3 feet tall.
The flowers of the Mother of a Thousands are pink or orange. The flowers can get around 1 inch long. The tubular flowers attract hummingbirds.
Mother of a Thousands sadly aren’t a host plant to butterflies.
This plant is NOT edible, it’s a type of succulent.
Mother of thousands don’t grow fruits or vegetables.
Free draining gritty pot mix is the best soil to grow Mother of a Thousands in.
Mother of thousands grow best in bright but indirect light for several hours per day.
Aphids mealy bug and scale insects might attack this plant but only occasionally because it’s a houseplant.
All parts of mother of thousands are toxic. If you decide to grow one of these plants in your home, it should be kept away from young children and pets since eating large amounts of it can be deadly.
Another interesting fact about this plant is that Mother of a Thousand plants do not produce viable seeds – this means that while the flowers may actually produce seeds, those seeds cannot sprout. That’s why this plant grows baby plants on the edges of its leaves. One plant can literally produce 1000 or more baby plants.
Baby plants grow on the edges of the leaves of Mother of a Thousand plants.
