Okay my Virginia gardening friends…or just anyone in the know…what will this cocoon turn into? I found three on my buddleia (Butterfly Bushes) in the butterfly garden I put into the perennial flower beds last year. They are each about two inches long, fat, and beautifully ridged shades of gray, taupe, and brown, with a bit of red cast to them. Am I hatching something wonderful, like a monarch or swallow tail butterfly, or Mothra?
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Replenishing Raised Bed Garden Soil
Raised bed vegetable garden soil soil needs to be replenished periodically. If you’ve done your job right and selected great soil, and amended it with nice compost, you’re going to have super garden soil for the first few years. Because you don’t walk on a raised bed garden the way that you do with typical…
How to Build a Vegetable Garden Using Raised Beds
If you’re thinking about building a vegetable garden this year, raised beds are one of the best ways I know of to start a vegetable garden. Instead of renting a rototiller or hand-digging the soil, adding amendments and turning it all under to create a good garden bed, you start with the best soil mixture…
Henbit: Plant Profile
I’ve put together this henbit plant profile to spotlight a lovely plant – which many gardeners consider a weed. Weed or flower? To me, it’s a matter of perspective. Every spring, at least one of my raised beds is covered in a thick mat of henbit. Henbit is both lovely and practical despite being labeled…
The Ultimate Guide to Growing Organic Beets
I wrote this Ultime Guide to Growing Beets to share my techniques for growing tasty, organic beets. Beets are a powerhouse of nutrition. Both the beetroot and the leaves and stems are edible. You can also can beets and beet greens to store them for year-round use. Here, I share with you a full guide…
Phil said immediately, ” It’s a praying mantis. They’ll have about 150 babies in each cocoon. Make sure they stay outside. It’s good to have alot of them around.They eat insects.” We have seen the babies right after hatching. They cling tenaciously to leaves and sway in the breeze. And always, they remind us to pray. 🙂 Annie
That would be wonderful! I’ve seen praying mantis egg cases in the woods, but they usually dangle under a branch, and these egg cases are firmly attached to the leaves. I go out every day and visit them. We left them and didn’t trim down the bushes….even if it was a moth, I’d have left it. I can’t wait until they hatch. And I love praying mantis. We had one on a window screen last fall that just stayed with us until the cold weather set in. We’d go and say hello to it every day.