Hi, Thanks for your response. They did just have some fish fertilizer (I was thinking maybe they were low in nitrogen) and they get full sun a few hours each day.

...I mean the "eggless/cat-less" plants. After posting this, in my urgency to get the cats into some "home," I found a link to a "raising MBs" site, and put them in a tupperware container with a wet paper towel. They seemed to have settled down (when I found them, and took the leaf off, they were all wriggly). So they're on my kitchen table at the moment, and I took some of the plants out of the pile and put them in vases. I don't know how long the MW will last in a vase; hopefully long enough for this project. There are probably 100 or more cats on this leaf. After I found them, and stopped ripping out the MW, I don't know if there's enough for all these cats. I'll probably end up taking them all over the neighborhood trying to find a new stand of MW for them to do their thing on. I don't own a fish-tank or anything to raise them completely. They'll have to go back outside. I feel like a louse.

Have you tried using a sharp stream of water from the hose to knock the aphids off the plants? That usually works fairly well, although with an infestation as heavy as the one in your photos, you might have to do it every day for a few days to knock all of them off and make them stay off the plants. I've never seen that many aphids on a plant before. When I first saw the photo, I was asking myself why the stems were yellow-orange, and then I realized the color was coming from the aphids. I assume those are the oleander aphids known to infest butterfly weed. It is such a tricky thing to try to control pests on butterfly plants without harming any monarch eggs or larvae. If you could check the plants first up close and know for sure that there's no Monarch eggs or cats on the plants, you could spray the plants, particularly the aphid infested parts, with insecticidal soap. Then I'd wait 30 minutes or an hour and then wash off the soap so it wouldn't stick around and cause any problems either for the plant foliage or any Monarch cats that soon might be laid on the plants. If I have to use insecticidal soap for something, I spray it in the evening when the sun is low in the west, then wait a little while to let it work, and then hose it off the plants. Soap plus our intense summer heat and sunlight can be a bad combination, which is why I don't spray it during the day when the plants are exposed to sunlight. Normally I'd say just to wait for the beneficial insects to show up, but in this case, maybe they are doing you a favor by not showing up. I'm fairly sure that my favorite garden helpers, the lady bugs, can and do prey upon butterfly eggs. Spraying the plants with neem oil could be a drastic last resort, but I wouldn't do it until I'd checked all the plants and made sure no Monarch cats or larvae were on the plants. I've had all kinds of insects all over the dill, parsley and fennel I planted for the swallowtails, and I've just hit them with the hose when there's no cats on the plants, and ignored the pests and let them be during times when the plants have had the beautiful swallowtail cats on them.

Post dinner report. We had about 20 people over for this buffet meal. The idea was to bring out seafood dishes one at a time. Sides and salads were available throughout the meal, and people took plates and sat wherever they wanted at two dining tables, on the living room couch and chairs, or just standing around. As DD and I planned the meal, it started making sense to deviate from the traditional Seven Fishes dinner of full -on entree dishes. Instead, we decided to have every seafood dish more like an appetizer, that you could eat off a small plate with just a fork, so that the evening was more like a cocktail party with endless food. We also decided to keep each dish simple so that preparing seven dishes and serving one every 20 minutes wouldn't be crazy. To the extent possible, we'd prep ahead. When guests started arriving, we had salmon mousse on crostini ready. Two kinds of salmon mousse, because DD objected to my version. I make it by baking salmon, then putting it in the food processor and adding a couple garlic cloves, some shallot, salt and white pepper, heavy cream, a little bit of brie cheese with rind, a pinch of wasabi, lemon zest, processing to the desired consistency and taste, then placing into a squeeze bottle with pastry tip. DD was outraged at the brie cheese, and insisted on making her own version. Which, in the end, included cream cheese :-) Next was a shrimp louie salad. SWMBO made this, so I don't know what was in it. We made a clam fettucine, following a recipe that was so minimalist, it was intriguing. Heat a few garlic cloves in wrote a lot of olive oil, discard the garlic cloves, add clams in shells, cook until shells open, remove shells, extract clam flesh, return clam flesh to oil with parsley, cook a couple minutes more. Yes, that was it. This was a good cookbook, so we thought maybe the stripped-down recipe would bring out the essence of the dish. Turns out it basically yielded clams... in oil - ick. So we used the result as a base for a more full featured clam sauce, which salvaged the dish. DD made oysters in a leek sauce. You shuck oysters, clean the shells, lightly cook oysters to release liquid, combine the liquid, white wine (not too dry - or champagne or Prosecco), and cream into a sauce - there was more to the sauce but I wasn't watching closely - assemble oysters on beds of wilted julienned leek in the shells, broil, then sauce and serve. Meanwhile there was manicotti as well as other side dishes and salads that people brought, on the buffet. I made crab cakes. This was crab meat, minced onion and garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, a little red pepper flake, mixed with boiled and riced potato, molded into patties, dredge in egg and coat in Panko crumbs, then deep fry. A messy thing to do but they came out nicely. Normally I use egg and bread, not potato, as the binding agent, but we were trying a recipe from the Peterson book. It is a cross of crab cake and latke. Personally I prefer the way I usually do it. Then we broiled some halved lobster tails, with plenty of melted butter. We should probably have extracted the meat and cut it to bite size pieces, in keeping with the cocktail party appetizer theme, but by now we'd been cooking for hours and were getting bogged down by guests wandering into the kitchen, helpfully and insistently busing piles of dirty plates and glasses into the midst of our prep and cooking space. So I was having to do dishes while DD cooked, and our smooth process was getting chaotic. That's the drawback of a small kitchen. My new dishwasher requires a particular workflow. One side of the sink is full of soapy water. Dishes are scraped into the other side of the sink (that has a garbage disposal) then placed in the soapy water. When enough dishes have accumulated, they are removed from the water and placed into the rack which is loaded in the dishwasher. After the dishwasher cycle, which takes three minutes, the rack is removed and set on the counter. The dishes and glasses come out very hot so they are dry in a minute. Quickly remove and stack the clean ware. This is an effective way to wash a lot of dishes very quickly, but definitely interrupts cooking. The seventh dish was to have been scallops in lobster butter. We collected the lobster shells and were starting to make the butter, but then SWMBO reported that everyone was full and it was time for tea, coffee, dessert and the White Elephant present game. So we shelved the seventh seafood dish with some relief. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do!