My milkweed garden is filled with pretty blooms in yellow, orange and red. It is also filled with tiny aphids who seem to be enjoying eating everything on the plant.
While a good soaking for soap and water will rid the plants of the aphids, so will a happy Ladybug. She is moving along eating those aphids like Pacman and dots. All of this, and I don’t see one Monarch caterpillar.
Well, we are on our way to Mars! Check out the view of the launch from my own personal launch patio in the backyard.
I don’t care how many launches I see, I am always still amazed at the idea that we can send these things with precision into space.
I also saw the neowise comet, but sadly, I was unable to get any photos of that to share, so you will just have to enjoy my Mars mission launch.
Okay, it was taken in 2019, but I have not been anywhere since we all have been in lock down, so I pulled one from this time last year. This is a fascinating rock formation from The Garden of the Gods in Southern Illinois.
Since I love fractals, this reminded me a lot of a fractal found in nature. Hopefully, we will one day be set free from our homes, and I can explore this park more.
This Pilates Woodpecker has found the old Hickory tree to be a smorgasbord of good eats. My idea of good eats and his are probably very different.
We have a pair that hangs out around our home eating up old trees and searching for goodies in rotted limbs.
Their call and response is fun to listen to even if their constant rat-ta-tat-tat can be a distraction while trying to work.
I dropped the top of one of my pineapples in the ground a couple years ago, and this is the fruit that it is trying to produce for me now.
I had no idea that pineapples flowered, so I was very delighted to see these pretty purple blooms on the little spikes of the fruit.
I read that it takes around three years to produce a pineapple, and then the plant creates offshoots that you can plant or runners that you and remove. Then the plant dies. I would never be a good pineapple farmer; I do not have that kind of patience.
This is a first for our little feeder. We have yellow-bellied sapsucker, and I do not think I have ever seen this little guy in our yard before. We get a variety, but many do not eat the bird seed that I put out, so it is always fun to see something different munching in the feeder.
The doves try to dominate the flat feeder, and this red-headed woodpecker is having none of it. He has crouched down and prepared to take a bite out of the dove that is trying to push him out.
These little skirmishes go on day in and day out. Doves sit and eat rather than perch and eat, so they will camp out in the feeder and not let anyone in unless I shoo them away.
Since their behavior is so obnoxious, I wish they would take their voracious appetites elsewhere.
Just a wisp of a moon still hanging around in the afternoon sky. I found it to be intriguing as it was framed between the fronts of the palm tree.
Just a simple moon in the sky on a bright winter afternoon in Florida.
It might be hard to see this photo, but there is a very, very ambitious little anole lizard thinking that he can eat that large month that was attracted to a light on my desk. I am thinking, no.
As it turned out, the little anole thought “no”, too. He really gave it a go though and chased after that month with really big eyes before giving up and eating something much smaller and probably less tasty.
Here is a closeup of a flower cluster on the ixora bush that is planted in front of my office window. These brilliant orange bushes will explode with color and make a nice orange hedge along the front of the house.
There are 562 species of the Rubiaceae family that the Ixora belongs to, and they consist of evergreen tropical leaves. They come from Tropical Asia, and they thrive well in Florida, so we use them for hedging and accent plants.
Julie L. Cleveland 