My Butterfly Dilemma
When I was thinking about what I wanted from our garden before we moved in, one thing that I listed was to include plantings that would support or enhance the biodiversity in our area … well, the critters have moved in.
I’m pretty sure these are the caterpillars of the Dainty Swallowtail Butterfly. They are certainly having a good feed on our mandarin tree. Happily, they are primarily confined to this one set of new leaves, and this particular tree has what I hope are enough other healthy leaves to compensate. For now, I’ve decided to let the caterpillars feed and keep an eye on things.
This one is on another citrus tree and is starting to look quite fat. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to see more of its life cycle.
It will grow into a butterfly like the ones below. I’m not sure whether this one was also looking to lay some eggs, but it was flitting all around the citrus trees. I do need to make sure that my citrus trees manage to get established, so we can’t feed too many caterpillars, but once the trees are bigger it probably won’t be much of a problem at all.
I will attempt to strike the right balance between, my citrus surviving and being able to provide us with food in the coming years and supporting our local critters. Do you garden? What’s your approach to managing visitors in your patch?
5 Comments
NGS
We don’t garden and just fill our yard with native plants and enjoy watching the birds and insects flock to our yard. If we had a garden, I’m pretty sure the rabbits and raccoons would destroy everything, so I just resign myself to going to the farmers market on a regular basis.
Melissa
I count filling the yard with native plants as gardening. The destroyers here are possums but luckily they haven’t really been visiting our garden here since we moved in. They may not have thought to since it was a building site for a couple of years. Possums here are highly territorial so I suppose eventually we’ll have some move in.
Elisabeth
Such gorgeous pictures.
We have almost zero landscaping – and not in a good way. More in a “our house has horrible curb appeal” way. We had to excavate for drainage and all the mature landscaping was torn up. We switched attention to some house upgrades that needed doing, but this summer we MUST do something about our horrible lawn and lack of plants. We literally have this wild overgrown thorny patch that covers a huge chunk of our side lawn. It wouldn’t be so bad, but our kids love to play close to it and we’ve now punctured at least 4-5 soccer/basketballs that land in the thorns!
Melissa
Yes, fixing the drainage will make a mess in the garden. Sounds dire, I look forward to seeing the tranformation.
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