Insects, Plants, Fungi and Animals
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A Gem Within a Gem
The coolest jumping spider I have ever seen awaited me last week as I added compost material to the rapidly growing blue facheiro next to the driveway. The Apache jumping spider, Phidippus Apacheanus, fit in perfectly like a color-complimentary orange jewel on a turquoise medallion. It’s metallic green chelicerae (beefy fang appendages near mouth) put it over the top for my viewing pleasure. This tiny stalking cougar with eight legs and lots of eyes is harmless to people but ambushes the bugs that land on our cacti to feed, so it is most welcome here. They occur in most U.S. states and Cuba. Pleasant surprises are always welcome as I…
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“Hey, that’s not a yardlong bean!”
These were so cute as not to generate the usual scream from Ma at several of the regular stops on the farm. I melted at the sight of this sweet baby Southern coachwhip snake catching sun and hopefully a passing breakfast while resting on a squash leaf. Known to eat rattlesnakes, as does the Indigo snakes that we have, you definitely want these around in this part of the country. The largest I have seen was in excess of eight feet in length on the house lawn recently. Perhaps they’ll make a meal of any squirrel that makes a move on the corn now coming up in the Duck Garden’s…
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Pilosocereus Royenii has Set Fruit and Flowered Again
Well, it was a success! Self-pollination with the expert advice of a botanist in AZ and those 3AM wanderings into the backyard resulted in fertilization and the first fruit on this cactus. The Royen’s tree cactus is busting out in a conveyor belt of buds, flowers and now fruit that should contain genetic clone seeds if I can keep the critters from getting it first. The second flower opened last night and was even prettier than the first. In the past two weeks the growing tip of the stem has become an ever-changing activity center full of intriguing protuberances with inspiring shapes, colors and functions. I’m not sure how many…
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Scene around the Farm
This week’s work gave me plenty of image material for the blog, as is so often the case while tending the different stations on the land. I’ve never seen so many species of swallowtail, and this pipevine swallowtail on a zinnia was striking. Sometimes what I see isn’t so good, namely the grasshopper eyeing the bean leaves, but then our handy egg hens never turn down a snack – there’s a cordless power tool for everything. The orb weaver spider I found one morning on the hard nursery shade cloth created it’s own patterned weave at the center of its web. These always get a break for the insect control…
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Rhinoceros Beetle
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What We’ve Been Tending this Week
And what a week it has been. With this heat it’s a good thing the watermelon is plentiful because we’ve been sucking it down to stay hydrated and fueled while caring for everything here. The birds have been working hard too, so their share of the melon crop has been earned. I think they’ve figured out that leaving some juice in the eaten out melon halves attracts a week’s worth of bugs, therefore extending the buffet. Farm and homestead plants need daily monitoring, watering, fertilization and repositioning. Mom’s orchids are flowering for an unexpected bonus round since December, and her Gasteria succulent has divided into a handsome clump on The…
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Red, Blue, Green, Oooh, Ouch!
In the span of a year here I’ve seen some stunning insects, and in some of those situations my prior background in collecting serves us well. Don’t need to whip out the field guide to know that some of these lawn jewels can hurt real bad or stink up the joint right quick if messed with. The large, fuzzy bright red “ant” is a wingless female wasp called a velvet ant, or cow killer. Though slow to anger it has the longest stinger of them all and packs a wallop. This is the second Spring in a row where I’ve first seen the smaller reddish brown species of velvet ant…
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Stalking Dinner
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Our Lizards
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Morphological Gems for the Eye, Cultivated and Found
