Busy, Busy, Busy

I have decided to compare myself with the bee.
Bees are busy and I am busy. In fact, I am as busy as a bee!
The little insect and I share space in the nursery. I often say "excuse me" to a bunch of them as I pick up a plant to move it. Their favorites seem to be the Black Adder Hyssop and the African Blue Basil. They buzz around but we have a peaceful co-existence.



If I were a bee, I'd be the worker bee. I would be female (and I am!) and my job would be to clean, collect pollen and feed the larvae. Not too different than what I do as a human, although I have to admit, I don't clean too much.

Fall is here so the bees are finalizing their pollen gathering, making honey, and preparing for winter, when they huddle together inside the hive and don't leave, eating that honey. Fall for this worker human means preparing for all the fall festivals. In days past, the fall was the harvest season. Although we are more removed from the actual gathering of the harvest, we still celebrate and prepare for the upcoming holiday season with craft festivals, pumpkin patches, and garden shows.

This weekend is Boktoberfest at Bok Tower Gardens (www.boktowergardens.org). Jim works there as a Head Gardener and he has our plants in the Plant Shop. The manager asked him to bring some out, and we've been filling the Great White Whale (van) and trailer with cestrums, grasses, coreopsis, stoppers, fiddle wood, sweet almond bush, just to name a few for the past two days. We have a garden wagon that we have to wheel across the front to the back, load it up with 10 3-gallon sized pots, and wheel it all the way back. There's a slight incline where the septic tank is, and you have to dig your heels into the ground to keep the momentum going.

After Boktoberfest the next weekend is the Garden Extravaganza in Munn Park in Lakeland. That will probably mean getting up at 4 to make a couple of trips back and forth. Jim has been saying we need to move half the plants in the nursery, and I really hope that after these shows that most of those plants don't come home!

Did you know that bees can see every color except red? They smell the flowers.

Sshh, Don't Tell Jim

Plants are like little kids. They have growth spurts. Just as one outfits a child with new clothes, a plant needs to move into a bigger pot. So I got busy repotting Love Grass, a lovely short native grass also known as Talahassee Sunset. It has lovely fringe and shades of pink in the blades.
Moving the Love Grass (I like to say it in my best Barry White voice)opened up an area in the one gallon section, and since we need to hit the back row with the hose after the sprinklers run, I decided to fill in the gaps and relocate the back row.
In doing this, I saw we had a few visitors.
But don't tell Jim! There's only so much Jim can do to protect the plants from all the things that enjoy them on the food chain. He's the grower and he likes his plants in good shape. I'm the nature geek and love looking at bugs. Snails, beetles, caterpillars, grasshoppers, bees and butterflies all come through our fly-by, crawl-through window for a meal on the go. Some are welcome and quite beautiful. They pick up some pollen or nectar and are on their way. Others, like a litterbug, leave tell tale signs. They lay eggs or munch holes. While the ladybug may munch on the aphids all over the Milk Weed (more ladybugs, please) and while a wasp may find something yummy to cart away, they can't cover it all.
Yesterday while moving the Sapphire Blue Salvia, I noticed a Lubber, a type of grasshopper. These things are amazing. Huge! They are about 4-5 inches big. They'll really freak out the insect-sensitive person. Their bite (on a leaf; not me)is in direct proportion to their size.
I think they are really cool. Awful deaths are in store for the Lubber by gardeners who don't respect them. They snip off their heads! That freaks me out. So I gently took Mr. Lubber away and tossed him into the scrub palm field, where I hope he'll find a good meal and not come back.
Mama Gulf Fritillary also came. Perhaps several Mamas. And they made their nursery on our Purple Passion Vine. Their little babies are orange caterpillars with a few black spikes lining their backs. I'll take a picture tomorrow and we'll see how many leaves will be on the vines. I am betting some will be absolutely stripped.
Now, while the caterpillar has a tremendous appetite and will strip a plant of its leaves, it won't kill it. In a few days they'll wander off and complete their metamorphosis by becoming a chrysallis. They'll turn into Mama Fritillary and find some more Purple Passion Vine.
Our Swallowtail caterpillar friends had already munched on our fennel and parsley, which are trying to recover, and they have moved on. It made my daughter sad, who liked to visit them and make their little orange horns pop out when she pet them.
I'm not going to pluck the caterpillars off. If I find a pretty Passion I want to take to market, I'll just move those babies to another vine that's serving as snacks.
But don't tell Jim, because while he shrugs his shoulders in resignation at a bunch of invading caterpillars, he probably will cut that Lubber's head off.

Our Neck of the Woods

Look at a map of Florida and find the center of the state with your eye. Chances are, you've landed pretty close to Lake Wales.

We've been here four years. I had visited Florida before, and my impression was a lot of sand, concrete, and of course, the beaches. And it was flat. But Lake Wales, while it has a lot of sand, has some really fun hills. I wish it snowed so I could go sledding down one. That probably won't happen.

Lake Wales is just one town on the Ridge, a section of land, like a spine, that trails down the state. Back in prehistoric times, this was the only part of Florida that stuck out of the water. The sand and hills come from ancient dunes. Fossil hunting is a popular past time here.

We are also in an ecosystem called the Scrub Palm Desert. That means more sand. We have some creatures that you only find around here, which makes us special, unique and often endangered.

Ridge Plant Nursery is out in the boonies of town, with sand roads (there's that sand reference again)and we have great nature. I've seen Scrub Jays, Glass Lizards, Indigo Snakes and Gopher Tortoises roaming around when we go for walks.

So we are in a neat place. We've become sensitive to what we share the land with and what we do with it.

Top Photo: That's our garden bed. Jim refers to it as the propagation garden.
Middle: We have some Swallowtail Caterpillars munching on the Fennel and Parsley.
Bottom: Just one view of the shade area (thank you, live oak for providing that). You can see the scrub palm field in the distance.

Thanks for taking a peek. I'll share more about what we grow and do next time!