more Hercules, please!

 The season is marching along, with so many daylilies...when did I plant these?

Hosta flowers are starting to come up, too.

The garden is really starting to pop (I'll have better pictures soon)!  It's definitely more tame this year - no 4' cosmos or marigolds - but it feels more manageable, too.  We've had regular rain, which is a big help!

Right on schedule, we have squash bugs.  And where there's squash bugs...

I had terrible germination with my pumpkins (like with everything else) and was only able to plant about 10 this year...and many of these were volunteers from the yard!  Even though the pumpkin plants are just a few inches tall, they are swarming with squash bugs.  I have to crush the eggs every couple of days, or the babies will eat the pumpkin leaves and possibly kill the plant.  

Herons are still visiting the pond regularly...

heron pouncing on a fish 

...and many other interesting creatures are around, too!

eastern tent caterpillar moth

eastern whitelip snail

house finch

song sparrow

plume moth

[look away if you're spider-averse!]

venusta orchard spider

hentzia jumping spider

Todd found this beauty in the driveway recently.

It's a female eastern Hercules beetle (a male would have gigantic 2.5" horns!).  Isn't she a beauty?  Check out her wings...it looks like a watercolor painting!

She was legs-up days ago, so I put her on the porch, where she moved sluggishly.  I didn't expect her to live, but she continued to do so, so I moved her to the garden.  She's gone now.  I hope she's laying eggs somewhere...I'd love to have more of these around!  

There was a rabbit right by the house...or there used to be.

The weather has been...amazing.  With one hot and humid exception, we've been in the 70s for several days.  It was 55 degrees when I woke up today!  Beautiful sunny days and blue skies.

The kittens watch me from their perch while I'm working outside...

...unless they're otherwise occupied.

Pleasant days indeed.

Have a great week!  

Ceti Eel Appeal

It's been really, really hot here, and it wasn't much relieved by a recent rain.

It's beautiful in South Carolina, with mostly wonderful weather, but June - September is a bit of a trial.  We're near 100% humidity...not too different from Indianapolis...but cool fall weather arrives much later. 

At least we've got some nice flowers coming up.  Our lantana bush has reached about half its eventual height, but still has lots of blooms.

Our butterfly bush is going strong.

Some mysteries...an amaryllis that we didn't plant bloomed in the garden earlier this summer, and now we have these little pitcher plants coming up everywhere.  They're pretty, but how did they get there?

Same with this small patch of daylilies.

These giant shamrocks (3" across!) come up at random times.

This Rose of Sharon-like bush is just starting to bud out.

Our late-blooming gardenia bushes are going strong, and the abelia bushes are starting to put out their little trumpets.

We see a lot of fungus this time of year, especially if we've had a lot of rain.  Sometimes it even pushes up through our blacktop!

 I love seeing more insects in the summer, even this pesky black beetle eating through one of our dogwood leaves.

All over the yard I saw tiny balls of fluff moving industriously over leaves.  It's the debris-carrying green lacewing larvae, a great insect to have in the garden.  See the jaws?

The larvae is hidden cleverly beneath.  He uses his disguise to get close to prey without arousing suspicion.  Genius!  And...am I the only one who sees the resemblance to Star Trek's ceti eel? 

Look away, arachnophobes...this beautiful venusta orchard spider is making short work of this little insect that's stumbled into her web.  I love those colors!

I've only seen our "goz" twice this past week, but it's easy to see that these 6-week olds are pretty near fully grown!  They're nearly indistinguishable from their parents, who still keep a sharp eye on their activities. 

The "lucky seven" are all accounted for, but the second group of 3 hatchlings is now down to a single chick.  We've got foxes and other predators here, so this is a pretty dangerous time for this little guys.

I've been doing  a lot of crafting inside (as time permits), but I hesitate to post future gifts.  However, sometimes the project takes a different direction.  I decided to make a pair of heavily-cabled socks for a friend.  The cables spiral over the heel and cover the front of the sock, all the way down to the toe.  I'm not keen on cabling without a needle, so I'm pretty slow.  Two weeks of night work on these guys and I was not even done with the first sock, and thoroughly tired of cables.

Second Sock Syndrome is a real thing, and I knew that I would never do all that cabling on a second sock.  Worse, I was 8 stitches off somewhere, so the cables on the existing sock weren't centered properly.  I frogged this guy last night and will use the yarn for something else.  I have an embarrassingly large queue on Ravelry (3000+!), so I've taken a little time to go through it and organize for future projects. I've found some long-forgotten gems and feel inspired to take up the needles again soon!

Have a great week!