Hello my friends,

I’ll admit the last couple of weeks have got away from me slightly, I genuinely cannot believe how busy I’ve been and at the same time don’t feel as though I’ve achieved anything (if that makes sense!).

Still, I’ve got a new butterfly tale for you this week. All summer I’ve been raising various butterflies (like I do each year!) the garden has been wonderfully filled with Comma (Polygonia c-album) and Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) caterpillars in the nettle patch that grows under the apple tree in my garden – unfortunately the nettles themselves are giant and literally grow up into the branches of the tree, I try to leave them alone as much as possible but once the spears are over six foot tall I clip them down to the ground and challenge them to grow again!

When it comes to cutting them down I actually check each spear and save the bugs, this year there were so many caterpillars I decided to create a ‘caterpillar nursery’ and try to recreate the nettle patch using potted nettles (yes, I also grown the stingy stuff in pots!).

Red Admirals in particular are always at risk of being attacked by parasitic flies/wasps which is a horrible way for them to die. So I get very excited when I them in the garden.

I’m totally fascinated with caterpillars, Red ad cats are fairly beige when tiny but when fully grown can be either black with a light green stripe or green which I magical! And Commas are little black cats that that become black/white/orange as they grow – its quite a pretty caterpillar, they have such cute antennae.

Hello my friends,

Happy weekend!!

I’ve got a new butterfly tale for you this week. I’m a great lover of ‘Cabbage butterflies’ they’re pretty much considered a pest and we as humans seem to actively seek and destroy them, which I find really sad so its become fairly well known that I purposely grow cabbages for the butterflies as I view them as a butterfly underdog. 

Anyway, this post began last autumn when the last batch of Large white (Pieris brassicas) caterpillars were happily munching on the last of my cabbages just as the rainy season started. I moved them (cabbage and all) into my butterfly house where they began to pupate over the next few days – these butterflies overwinter in the pupa stage and emerge in spring. So I had 43 of these pupa to guard over the cold moths. (if you want to see a reel of one after its release click HERE *link takes you to my IG*)

Excitingly these butterflies all successfully emerged and were released back at the end of April, Large whites are funny they don’t like to breed indoors but the minute they’re outside they mate left, right and centre, one of the females laid a batch of eggs on my Honesty plants, as my cabbages weren’t very big – unfortunately I didn’t spot the tiny caterpillars until I’d cut the plant down, so feeling guilty I bought them a tray of baby cabbage plants and moved them to safety. 

They ate me out of house and home!