On Thursday morning, Neil looked into the butterfly habitat and noticed that our little chrysalis friend had opened up and a beautiful butterfly was flying around the inside of the netting. It must have emerged early in the morning because its wings were already pumped up and ready to fly. In case you haven’t read as much on raising caterpillars as I have (and really why would you?, here’s a good site. When a butterfly emerges their wings are soft and they spend some time “pumping” them up. Visions of butterfly gyms are coming to mind, aren’t they? Soon they harden and the butterfly is ready to fly off. This is quite clearly a very vulnerable time for the butterfly.

We seem to have a female, so hopefully she will lay lots of eggs and we will see her descendants in the years to come.

This past weekend we went away to visit Neil’s parents. I picked some queen anne’s lace to bring back for our caterpillar to munch on. Lindsay and I looked and looked for it, but couldn’t find it. I was worried it had gone the way of it’s sibling, but then I spotted it.

You can see the little bungee cord threads it spun to secure itself to the parsley plant. These caterpillars can make either a brown or a green chrysalis depending on what plant they choose to latch onto. I think the green is prettier than the brown.

I’m really looking forward to seeing this little critter hatch (or eclose). We’re going away in the middle of August, so fingers crossed it will do it sooner. Otherwise, I will need someone to pupae sit for us.

Last week we got fennel as part of our CSA share. I made a yummy shaved fennel salad with a lemon dressing and tossed the ferny tops into my chicken scrap tub. When I went to take the greens out to the chickens I noticed 2 interesting caterpillars munching away. Upon checking the internet (what caterpillars are on my fennel?) I found out that they were Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillars. I found this site to be particularly helpful.

I thought it would be a fun project to raise our caterpillars indoors. Besides fennel, they like anything related to carrots, such as parsley and queen anne’s lace. I pulled a parsley plant out of my garden, stuck it in a pot and laid the fennel greens on top of it. I also borrowed a Butterfly Garden enclosure to contain the critters. They really move around when you aren’t looking. I had a funny moment when I was looking at my parsley plants outside and thinking about these beautiful, exotic caterpillars that would *never* live in Brooklyn. Well, there was one sitting right on top of my parsley plant. I decided to leave that one in the great outdoors and concentrate on the 2 I had. After a day, one had doubled in size and the other one died.

The one we have left, which we affectionately refer to as chubby, keeps doubling in size and eating up a storm. I added carrot tops to the enclosure and it seems to be thriving. Here’s a video of the little guy munching away on the parsley. I shot still frames and made a kind of time-lapse video. It only took about a minute for him to eat all those leaves!

I can’t wait to see it transform! My sister raised some Anise Swallowtails in her garden. You can read about them in her blog here.

Black Swallowtail Caterpillar from Martha Lazar on Vimeo.

This year we finally got smart. Over the last 8 years or so we have had a neighbor’s mulberry tree drop berries in our yard. I have very fond memories of climbing mulberry trees as a child and eating the sweet berries. That was never possible with this tree. The tree isn’t in our yard, so it’s not possible to climb the trunk. And the branches are so high that you cannot reach the fruit. So by the time the berries drop, they are already overripe and starting to ferment.

I am not a fan of people complaining about “messy” trees. The leaves, needles, pollen they produce are part of the package. This mulberry tree has gotten so large in the past couple of years that it shades and overhangs more than 1/3 of my garden. The chickens eat some of the berries, but really cannot make a dent. I lay out landscaping cloth during the 3 weeks of berry drop to catch the berries. You may have seen me waging war in recent years.

Anyhow, this year instead of complaining about it, we decided to do something about it. We hired an arborist to prune the branches that overhang our yard. Seems totally obvious, right? Well, when you are a renter, there is a weird mindset about paying for stuff like this. Anyhow, we are thrilled with the job they did. They had phone lines, a fence and our chicken coop as obstacles, but they didn’t hit any of them. It is money well spent to be able to avoid 3 weeks of rotting berries dropping on our backs when we are in the back of our garden.