I have been doing a bit of this, and a bit of that in the yard this past month. Our new butterfly area on the side is really filling in, even if it is mostly milkweed. This is a spot that is almost always in direct afternoon sun, so not a lot we can put in there. We have been getting a bit of rain which helps everything grow. My son spotted a hummingbird a few weeks ago and we have been getting some painted buntings. I have a picture of the female bunting, but no luck getting one of the male.


I was getting some visitors to the bird bath that I set up, but a certain little dog in her quest for lizards managed to dig underneath the cement base and knocked the whole thing over, cracking the water basin. I seriously considered using her for vulture bait, but decided to forgive her. I will be getting a new basin when I can afford it. We now have a feeder in our front yard, and we have seen a few birds there. That area looks really nice with the double hanging hook, some bright flowers and some native plants.

We have been rooting a lot of stuff and it looks like we are going to have some gumbo limbo trees soon. For those of you in northern climates, we call these tourist trees also, since they often have red peeling skin. We have lots of porterweed showing up in places and we have been moving that to areas where they will attract more bees.

In addition to wildlife gardening, I have been doing some vegetable and herb gardening and we have so far been able to eat some fresh tomatoes and add herbs to our salad.

January Blahs

Okay, even here in Florida, it seems the native plants may be taking a rest. I have some color in my yard, but a lot of things just aren't blooming like they were a few months ago. I could run out, spend 50 dollars and put tons of impatiens all over my yard, that is what most people do here in the cooler months. I am not doing that because they are water hogs. I spent yesterday,trimming, pruning and I am waiting for the next rainy day to throw down some fertilizer. The only things really blooming right now are the scarlet milkweeds. I am still getting butterflies, but not seeing quite as many. I know I had two huge caterpillars yesterday on my passion vines, and I have two so far unidentified ones on my dutchman's pipe. We are pretty sure they are some sort of swallowtail, because we read that the dutchman's pipe is a host plant for one species. We aren't getting huge numbers of birds, but we do seem to be getting more of the native doves and not the huge collared doves that were eating tons of bird food. Our native garden that is planted with the beach sunflower is attracting small birds to eat the seeds, and to catch any bugs that they can find. Today we did have a visiting ibis, but even he is blah looking right now, changing from brown to white according to my son. He did get a picture of him. We also think he was checking out the fish in the pond. I think our coolest visitor lately have been a painted bunting, but we haven't managed to get his picture.