A Wild Silk Moth

Found this little fellow in my greenhouse a few weeks ago. I was wondering what it was so I took its picture and sent it off to a friend who is an expert in such things. She told me it is a Wild Silk Moth. Wow what a deal. I know we had wild silk moths in TX but never thought I would ever see one.

I did some research to found out what they eat. Hmm the like various different types of trees and some of the are citrus. Oh no I have a lime tree in the greenhouse. The little worms can eat 10's of thousand times their weight. So I checked the leaves of my lime tree for eggs, it is fine and I have not seen much munching on the leaves. Isn't nature wonderful?

Garden Ramblings

Below you will see a few of my photos of some seedling I potted up several weeks ago. I am sorry that it took me so long to get them posted. I will post some more recent photos of my plants shortly.
The weather is creating issues. We have 90 degree days and then 40 degree days. Some nights we are in the 40's and like tonight and possibly tomorrow night we will be at freezing. Thank goodness for the greenhouse. We have a brooding light set up in there to help keep it warm at night. I think we are keeping it at least in the 40's. I did place a shade cloth over the roof so that the sun would not bake the new little plants. We have also had to deal with wind. There have been gusts up to 50+ MPH at times. It is a good thing I secured the greenhouse to the house. It has a light frame and plastic cover so one light breeze can blow it over. This is the second year so I am thinking about materials to use to make a more permanent cover. This may add a little weight so it won't blow over.

Yesterday I spent time planting some of the tomato plants I purchased into larger pots. I wanted to get them out of the 4 and 6 packs since I have a little more then 2 weeks before I will consider planting them into the garden. I have about 30 tomato plants right now. Ok it may not seem like a lot to some of you but it is a lot for us since there are only two of us and most of the people I know have gardens too. So I have some Early Girls, they are good stand bys for me and do well here. I have 8 celebrity tomato plants also. I haven't grown them since I first started a veggie garden. I had not seen Marglobe in the nurseries for years and decide to give them a try also. Of course Juliets are a must and I am thinking of trying one of them as a topsy turvy tomato. They are not large enough to plant yet so it may be a few weeks before I can show you mine in its container.

I have a part time job in a nursery for the planting season. I am finding myself tempted by these new to me tomato and pepper plants on the market. So I have invested and bought a few of them. The new to me peppers are Lipstick and Sheepnose peppers. The tomatoes are Hillbilly, Country Taste, and Deborao. Had to have the last one since it is almost my name sake. Stay tuned for a report on these as the season goes on.

I plan to get some flowers started during the week but I need to get some more soil. Ran out while transplanting my tomatoes and I need to finish that and then start my flowers. I don't mind if I don't get blooms right away so flowers come second to my veggies.

More later and I will have new photos too.
Happy Gardening

Teeny Tiny Peppers

These are two of four that I potted up. The peppers took a long time to germinate. It was several weeks between the time I potted these up and took their photo to the last of the seedlings. I now have 6 good looking sweet pepper mix peppers potted up and also 6 frying pepper peppers ready to be potted up. They finally germinated a few days ago.

Tomato Babies

It is hard to tell but these are tomato seedlings. Again these photos were taken weeks ago. The ones on the left are Romas and the right ones are Juliets. Of course right now that they are transplanted into larger pots I did not get them marked and can't tell what one is what. Dah! Note to self mark them right away.

Cucumber seedlings

This photo is a few weeks old. These two seedlings are Armenian Cucumbers. They are similar to English Cucumbers so it will be interesting to see how they do here. I now have 6 pots of these started. These two are now looking much different. I will post more recent photos of them later on.