"whoever touches us, teaches us....."

Saturday, August 28, 2010

A Butterfly Interlude

My son keeps a small herb garden outside our front door. He harvests his 3 kinds of basil, oregano and 2 parsleys every night for his food of choice; pasta. Usually our herbs are so prolific that we have ridiculous amounts that 50 people could not consume. This year they have been scanty and he has had to ration just to have enough. He came out one day and ALL of his parsley plants were stripped to the stems and the ground. I mean nothing was left. After some searching he found some caterpillars lingering and devouring the final stems and we captured them and but them in a critter cage. Now he wanted to protect his parsley and take them to another location to release. I wanted to see butterflies. And since parsley and I think fennel is mainly all this particular butterfly eats...and we were leaving for the beach in a few hours...I went to the grocery store and bought the largest bunch of parsley I could find,and  stuffed it in the cage. I was hoping to see the whole chryssalis (sp?) thing happen but we were out of town and missed it . But we had a critter cage with a few stems left and 5 beautiful swallow tail butterflies. Unfortunately I didn't get a photo if them, but we released them all at once and they were very beautiful! We have started a new crop of parsley; for my son so he make pasta. For me, so I can feed butterflies.

5 comments:

secret agent woman said...

That's neat - next time remember to get a shot of the butterflies being released!

(I had unimpressive basil this year, too.)

Day Traveler said...

Very nice post Pat. Great photo of the caterpillers. Good thing they didn't drown!
:)

Red Shoes said...

Those are awesome!! At first, I thought those might be Catalpa worms... how beautiful!!!

:o)

~shoes~

NCmountainwoman said...

What a nice story! Glad you were able to rescue them and release them to fly away.

Vicki Lane said...

A beautiful picture! Glad they made it.