Great Painting

Little Googie just loves to do his paintings. Here is one of his latest paintings. When I asked him what the painting was he said that it was a little boy looking for Jesus. This is from the same little boy that thanked me the other day when I walked by him and stopped to kiss him on the head.

Praying Mantis

This spring, a friend of ours hatched some praying mantises from eggs and needed to find homes for some of them; therefore, we offered to "adopt" a bunch of them to place in our garden. We were hoping that they would eat the big ants that were taking up residence around the bean and tomato plants. Well, was I surprised to see this huge "grown up" praying mantis on our door the other day. I couldn't believe how big it was. Pretty cool, huh?

Swallowtail Caterpillar Update

Yes, it's true I'm the proud mother of boys! And as everyone knows, boys love bugs. Hence, my recent focus on bug photos. Here is a picture of the swallowtail butterfly coccon in Bubba's bug habitat.

Pictures of Swallowtail Caterpillars

Bubba, Hubby and I have found at least 8 swallowtail caterpillars in our garden! Just as I promised yesterday, I am uploading some photos. This is a photo of two of the swallowtail caterpillars that we found in our garden today. How exciting! We could even see them munching on the parsley. Bubba also has two in his habitat as you can see below.

Today was also our first day of school. Everything went really well. Bubba started the day with one hour of piano practice and then we all got together at 10:00 for a family Rosary and the official start of our school year. Googi was so excited to start Kindergarten and he spent some time after lessons were over looking over his school books. He particularly enjoyed his new math book and was so thrilled that he already knew most of the things in his book.

Gardening Is So Much Fun!

Yes, it's Labor Day, the un-official end to summer . My garden is still doing well; however, the tomatoes did not do as well as they did last year. Our yield was lower and now the plants that are left look like they might have late blight. I'll probably spray them with an organic fungicide from Gardens Alive. That fungicide helped me save a tomato plant earlier in the season that had early blight. Also, the peppers have been doing so well that I have been harvesting banana peppers, Hungarian peppers, jalapeno, Serrano and green-to-red peppers out the wazoo. We are still trying to figure out what to do with all those peppers. However, I did not have any luck with the cucumbers this year and the pumpkin plant only yielded one pumpkin.

This year I have the most amazing garlic ever. I planted them in the fall from bulbs I ordered from the Garlic Store and I am so impressed with the quality of the garlic I got from them that I just had to order some more for next year. This week we will eat the last of the potatoes from the garden :( No more yummy fresh potatoes until next summer.

It's too bad that the lettuce didn't do too well this year. No problem, next year will be better. Bubba was so excited to find four parsley worms in the curly parsley. He collected two of them and placed them in this "bug habitat." He already raised one swallowtail butterfly this year and last year he was able to raise two swallow tails and one monarch butterfly. The caterpillars really like the curly parley. We can't figure out why they prefer the curly parley over the Italian, flat-leaf parley. We have both of them planted next to each other and have never found a parsley worm caterpillar on the flat-leaf parsley. Of course this is fine with us since we eat the flat-leaf parsley. I'll post pictures of the caterpillars and the butterfly if I get a chance to do it.

Tomorrow will be our official first day of school. Let's pray that it will be a good one.