More Spring Happenings

This is the season where the garden changes visibly every single day. There's so much going on!

 

All kinds of flowers are blooming, and each day old flowers close up while new ones open.

 

There are monarch caterpillars of all sizes.

 

This is a close-up picture of a Citron flower. Citrons are a very old variety of citrus. The fruits are not particularly good to eat, but the peel of the fruit and the flowers are very fragrant.

 

Here's a very young Cloudless Sulphur butterfly caterpillar. He's very tiny, but he's already eating holes in the leaves of the senna tree.

 

This picture may look like the leaf has an eye-stalk like a snail, or maybe an antenna like a moth -- but it's really the egg of a Green Lacewing. Lacewings are pretty green insects that tend to fly around at night. Lacewing larva are considered very good for gardens, since they eat huge numbers of garden pests like aphids, thrips, mealy bugs, and leafhoppers.

 

Nasturtiums are not only colorful, but edible too. They're spicy!

 

Do you think this spider has a grayish abdomen? The answer may surprise you! It's actually a brown Wolf Spider, and that round gray thing is an egg sac that she's carrying around with her!