Narcissus – FOTD – 05/21/19
These flowers used to grow on the other side of the driveway. In the garden, in a grouping with the daffodils. I don’t know how they wound up on the opposite side of the tarmac.
Wind? Birds? Bees? The driveway is too wide for any kind of natural spreading, so something moved them.
I was really surprised to see them. I thought they had died. I thought a lot of things had died. Some things did.
The old Rhododendrons died, but new ones popped up and are blooming. We have to cut down the dead ones and are planning to on Wednesday. We also need to cut down the Holly which isn’t a bush and has become more of a tree. A big, bushy tree.
We have about a thousand baby-sized maple trees trying to grow. And we have too many signs that the Gypsy moth caterpillars have come back.
NOW we need rain and a lot of it. Maybe a solid week of rain would kill them before they get their tiny fangs into our trees.
It’s the only thing that will stop them. I get totally depressed even thinking about them. The last time they showed up, I hid in the house for weeks while they killed off all our trees. I’m trying to not see it, pretending it isn’t happening, but I’m terribly afraid that it is. And this time, I simply can’t afford to bring in the spraying people.
No money.
The irony of this is that these caterpillars BLEW HERE FROM A CITY MORE THAN 50 MILES AWAY. All that windy weather? It brought the monstrous bugs back. Again.
I’m not thinking about it because maybe it won’t happen. Talk about positive thinking, I actually think I’m more afraid of the caterpillars than Trump. That’s serious fear.
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Categories: #Flowers, #Photography, Cee's Photo Challenge, Flower of the day, Nature, Spring
SERENDIPITY - SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
I’m sick of rain, but I’ll be first in line to beg Mother Nature to douse your area with several days of it if it will kick these guys to the curb.
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It is indeed….. In many countries and parts of this world (Pat Gerber too) last year brought up grubs by their thousands and they literally ate up whole lawns, veggie gardens and such. Here in France we had two years in a row a larvae who ate up our 30yr old (and immensely expensive) box ‘trees’ in less than two hours. I replaced some with young plants (@20€ each), replaced the soil, cared for them, only to have them destroyed by the same enemies a year later. Now I have given up on them but the roots of the first ones are still visible and hurt my mind and heart every day….
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We had a terrible case of grubs. One day, a flock of Robins came and ate them. Every last one. We had the FATTEST robins you’ve ever seen. Turns out, Robins adore grubs.
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Beautiful flowers!
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Such a surprise, too. I hadn’t seen these in a couple of years. I’m betting a bird dropped the seeds. At least there’s some use for bird poop!
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Sometimes squirrels dig up the bulbs in one place and bury them in another spot, too. I had some daffodils get “moved” that way in the past!
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Maybe you can pack up all the caterpillars and ship them to Trump. We have a competition with squirrels as to who is going to get to our peaches first. One year they decimated the tree. We tried putting a cage around it, but they got inside and trapped themselves, still eating. We had to release them. Now, we pluck the peaches when they’re not yet ripe and put them in the sun on windowsills until they’re ready to eat. The lemon tree is safe. They have my neighbor’s orange tree to raid .
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That’s I think how you have to do it. That’s what they do in the orchards too. We do have some peaches, but apples are the big crop. We have apple orchards all over the place. You can pick your own or just buy them. These days, I buy them but we used to do a family picking thing ever fall.
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The Narcissus are lovely. I’m finding things are moving around in our garden too and think it may be the squirrels who dig up the bulbs, thinking to eat them, then dropping them somewhere else.
Leslie
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I’m told it is the wind. That’s how we got this year’s caterpillars. They BLEW here from miles away. So I have to assume that flower seeds blow around too. Although bird droppings are also a big transporter of flowers. Not squirrels, usually. Birds.
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No doubt the wind will take things far….
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My favorite flower. I love its fragrance
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They are lovely and how they got over there, I still have no idea. I’m guessing wind. We’ve had a LOT of wind!
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But they grow from one plant to another, like baby plants. It must be some person who has transplanted them.
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I remember it too. Your poor trees. I hope you get that rain to drive them away.
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The rain wakes up another bug which attacks Gypsy moth caterpillars. We got this little killer from Japan in the 1970s, but it has become a major help in stopping the invasions. We have lost ALMOST a million acres of hardwood forest to these ugly insects. All the black oaks in Pennsylvania were killed by them. And when they attack pine trees, they do NOT refoliate. They just die. We have acres of standing dead pine trees.
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Not an attractive sight.
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I remember your last gypsy moth attack
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I still have nightmares about it.
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