Lemons as big as oranges!

Our trusty lemon tree has been very generous this spring and summer. Twice now we have harvested enough to make a dozen lemon juice ice cubes plus a weeks' worth of lemon syrup (for homemade lemonade).

Being a tall and wide tree, I often looked wistfully at the really big lemons that I just could not reach (without chopping most of the branches off and using these to construct a climbing frame to the top).

But occasionally we got a windfall of extra-large fruit that we just have to record for posterity.

There was no-one around to help me hold the measuring tape against it, but you can see its size relative to a standard glass tumbler.

TLM was available for this one, which measured out at 10.5cm long.

Alas, both lemons are no longer as they have long since been consumed...

Aphids. Hate 'em.

I was admiring our swan plant and all the little monarch butterfly caterpillars feeding off it, when I noticed little clusters of tiny wee yellow bugs with lots of legs. But I wasn't sure what they were or whether they were a bad thing.

When it comes to gardening, if I'm not sure I let Nature worry about it.

A few days later I decided they didn't belong on our swan plant, so I scraped some of them off with a stick. I didn't do a great job, but then I was trying to avoid damaging the plant.

Then TLM googled "swan plants yellow bugs" (or something), and found out those little yellow things with tiny little legs that seemed wave at me were in fact aphids.

Apparently you have to kill them or they will kill your swan plant. And you have to keep at it or they will take over. Then you will have no swan plant with testicle-shaped seed pods, and you will have no  monarch butterflies or catepillars because they will have nothing to eat.

It sounds like aphids are the nits of the swan plant world.

When you crush them they leave a pretty yellow stain on your fingers...

Help - caterpillars are killing our swan plant!

This summer we got a much bigger swan plant than the one we had last year, then covered it in plastic mesh to discourage monarch butterflies from laying eggs on it until it was nice and big.

By the time I removed the mesh, the plant had doubled in size and - to my surprise - there was already a fat caterpillar there.

Not long after that caterpillar went through its cycle and left the nest, about a billion tiny new caterpillars appeared! (More like about 20 - but still a lot).

And now they have devastated our plant. I tried laying bits of pumpkin about because my hairdresser say they liked it, but that's had very little effect.

I just hope they'll hurry up and make like a chrysalis already, before every single leave is chomped.

And then there was one...

In memory of Munchy the caterpillar

About two months ago, monarch caterpillars finally started to appear on TLM's swan plant (which she's had since Christmas).

First one, then another, and so on until there were five caterpillars of varying size, chomping their way through the swan plant leaves. We were so excited to be part of the monarch butterfly life cycle!

TLM named them Munchy, Crunchy, Punchy, Lunchy and Yawny. They munched and crunched (as you'd expect) until there were very few intact leaves left.

And then they started disappearing. Punchy was the first to go, and then Lunchy, until....there was only one left on the plant. The birds must have been picking them off once they got big enough to be noticed.

Then we found one dangling from the top of our wooden fence. Hooray, we thought. It's about to become a chrysalis!

But he didn't turn into one. He uncurled, and then just hung there until we realised that the life had gone out of the poor creature. We were down to just one caterpillar after all.

Every day we go and check on Yawny, hoping he gets to complete his life cycle and become a chrysalis and then a butterfly. Hoping that he doesn't become a bird's dinner.