Growing milkweed to attract butterflies

A few years back my friend planted a milkweed plant in his garden box in our backyard. That plant birthed willow like spores that spread among the other garden boxes. Milkweed is a favorite food source for Monarch butterflies. So ever since then we have seen plenty orbiting the plants.

This is a picture of the flowers the plants produce.

The striped caterpillars are all Monarch happily munching away. The plants themselves will recover from their leave stripping. How many do you count in this photo?

You should then expect to see these guys hanging in different places around your garden. These are the chrysalis to which the butterflies will hatch from. I actually found one on a house plant I put outside for a week and after moving the plant back inside the butterfly hatched in my living room.

Having milkweed in your garden affords you these great opportunities to get up and close views of the beautiful butterflies.

I helped relocate this guy to a nearby milkweed plant to help give him a jump on where the good stuff is located.

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Topping your early pepper plants

So I know you are going to think why would I want to cut the tops off my young pepper plant? Won't it die? Won't it hurt the plant? Take this example above of this young Shishito pepper plant. Now you can see with my snips I am about to cut just the top section of the leaves. Below the cut area I still have three levels of leaves. I don't recommend cutting your plant if it only has one set of leaves. Only perform topping when there are more than one set, preferably multiple leave layers. The cut will force growth back to the lower levels making your plant more stable with more lower branches as well produce more fruit. One stalk will be unstable when fruiting and limit production but the topping will add more layers and depth to your plant. This topping exercise can be performed more than once to help make a more dense plant. Some will even go so far as to remove flowers to help the plant grow larger or stronger before producing peppers.

Pest Control. My methods of extermination.(Gophers mainly)

So if you've seen some of my past posts you know that I've had encounters with possums and raccoons in my backyard garden. I've trapped 3 raccoons and eliminated 2 possums but gophers had been a problem in the past I wasn't really willing to tackle. At least until recently. The gophers in my backyard alley were ruining plants and soil everywhere. I'd had enough. So after some serious research I chose my weapon. A Victor Black Box Gopher trap. The amazon reviews were great and it was under $15. Now as you see the trap here it's set and ready to go. You would just point that end (the open end) towards an open tunnel. It works like a reverse mouse trap, instead of pinning a rodent down it pulls them up and pins them to the roof of the trap. The trigger is that coat hanger looking metal piece in the middle. It packs quite a punch when triggered. Now you can't just look for an open hole and stick it in front of it. I watched YouTube for about an ho...

Tomatillo stages

Just a few shots of my juvenile tomatillo plants. Above is what the tiny tomatillo starts out like. It will quickly grow and expand out. It's good to have some kind of netting, fencing or string because the stalks of the tomatillos tend to weaken with the rising weight of ripening tomatillos. I used some clothesline to help guide my young plant towards my fence in hopes that I can weave branches for structure. I think the smaller plant may be a purple tomatillo plant. It would be a welcomed color change from all the greens and yellows.

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