MLK Quote

MLK Quote

Nature's Inspiration Movie

http://www.flickspire.com/m/HealthierL433/NaturesInspiration -- Nature's Inspiration Movie: The photographs in this short video are from award-winning photographer, Ken Jenkins, and they are breathtaking. However, this video is much more than beautiful photographs! Peggy Anderson has compiled beautiful quotations from the likes of Emerson, Thoreau, and many others that truly capture the beauty of nature and solitude. Absolute must watch for nature lovers.

Sunday, August 7, 2016

I'm joining in the memes hosted by Eileen,  Rambling WoodsSt Germain's and Today's Flowers meme.

Look what I found on my parsley plants :-D. These are the caterpillars of Black Swallowtail Butterfly, a really gorgeous butterfly that is found in all over the North America. It is apparently the state butterfly of New Jersey. It constantly flies around in my garden but I never get the chance to take a picture as they are too restless a butterfly; all the time flittering around. A picture of the butterfly is in the top part of my blog -- it's that black butterfly with beautiful designs on its wings. It's the fifth picture in the series, right next to the tomato-cucumber picture.

 

This is called the first instar of the Swallowtail catterpillar. This apparently looks like bird-poop and thus the birds leave them alone



From the first instar, they become these chubby neon-green caterpillars with black lines and orange-spots



When the caterpillar is disturbed, it protrudes out these orange V-shaped Ostemetrium. It's some kind of protection tools for the caterpillar. When feel threatened the ostemetrium puts out some kind of offensive odor. I tickled it, and it put out the ostemetrium. I didn't get any odor. I guess the predators find the smell offensive.

After these photo-shoots, I went out to the garden. I'm growing lots of hot pepper this year along with some sweet and milder ones. So, this is a small harvest of various types of pepper, lemon-cucumber (a very prolific plant), ground-cherries, beans and some greens:





This is Bhut Jolokia or Ghost Pepper. It is apparently one of the hottest pepper on earth; it is 400 times hotter than the hottest Tabasco sauce. And, I'm growing this :-) because I'm crazy :-P



Small bees and wasps on sunflower. Do you know that the size of a sunflower is related to the size of space it gets to grow? I didn't know that. Being a lover of sunflower, I started growing them in every possible space I could find, and found out this truth: given bigger space, the sunflower will have the optimal bloom size. But, if it gets smaller space, the blooms become smaller.



Honey-bee and aphids (the yellow ones) on Swamp Milkweed.



Do you think bees sleep? Or they become too heavy to fly after  a good dinner? Now and then, I find bees clinging still (as if they are sleeping) on flowers; they will remain like that throughout the night and will fly away the next morning.



Bumble-bee sipping nectar from flowers.