Garden happenings

 I harvested this handful of cotton a few days ago, from the two cotton plants I over wintered.   There have been a few bolls ready to harvest over the past few months, but these all popped at the same time!  I now have a sandwich baggie full of home grown cotton and two very straggly, ugly cotton plants.   I'm not sure if I'm going to over winter them again.   Our climate really doesn't support the growth of cotton and it's not like I'm getting a superb harvest from my potted plants.

There are a couple of milkweed plants growing in the garden, hidden in with the madder plants.   This year I saw a monarch butterfly caterpillar.     Oddly enough, this is the first time I've seen one in the wild, on a milkweed, where they're supposed to be.  I was pretty happy and hopefully it survived to make a cocoon.

I was in the garden, picking a tomato and realized that the whole top part of one of the plants was missing.   It was like it had been snipped off.  There were several other branches lower down that were stripped off all their leaves. 

After careful checking I found this tomato hornworm, another caterpillar I'd never seen before.  This thing was huge.  It must have been almost 4 inches long!  My sweetie snipped the branch it was on and tried to feed it to the chooks, but they wanted nothing to do with it. 

I looked them up and apparently they eat pepper plants as well.  I wonder if they were responsible for a couple of my pepper plants just disappearing over night?   I was definitely not as happy about seeing this beast as I was the monarch caterpillar.

I made english muffins from scratch.   I used a recipe from 1859.  It was quite easy with delicious results.