Ferns are tasty. Many foods will make you sick if you eat enough of them. At a meeting of the Texas Gulf Coast Fern Society we had a program that included Fiddlehead casserole, Steamed fiddleheads, and fiddlehead salad. It was good fun. They are available on line, most commonly Bracken Fern Pteris aquilina. Vegetable fern, Diplazium esculentum, is very easy to grow and can take over your garden in no time. It makes a little tree fern and is great in salad.

Well I didn't see anymore of those pesky boogers, but I decided to spray it with some organic spray from Home Depot made for Fruit and Vegetable plants. We'll see how it goes tomorrow. I also noticed that black ants (Sugar ants?) are crawling all over my mint, so I sprayed it too :P Gosh, did they disappear in a hurry like :P I've just really gotten back into gardening, so I guess I'm learning all about these pesky little insects. A friend of mine told me to sprinkle red pepper around the plants and that it would keep the ants away. :) I want to get a stevia plant, so I guess I'd better do that :P On the bright side, will tending my growing garden, I had the opportunity to watch a Great Horned Owl mosey about my backyard with a little bird pestering him nearby :P And a little hare, who didn't see me, made his way onto my deck. Only when I moved and made a noise did he hop away. :)

OK, we put the 6 caterpillars back onto the orange tree. Poor baby tree, barely made it through the Big Freeze and just coming back from the base when these critters found it. It has lost about half its leaves to them. It only has 3 stems each about 8 inches long. At least it is now in the ground and has good roots to drive new growth. On the bright side, two of the caterpillars have repositioned themselves on the trunk and appear to be full grown so maybe they are ready to begin the conversion to butterflies. There are 3 that are smaller and they still have a lot of eating to do. Thanks for the info.

Usually caterpillars are easily controlled with BT Worm Killer from Green Light. It gets diluted fairly heavily when you apply so a lifetime supply costs about $10. Bacillius thurengenses (BT) is a disease to caterpillars causing instant and permanent paralysis. Spray it on and they either become paralyzed immediately or the first time they eat something coated with the BT. The natural predators for caterpillars are the paper wasps that are building their nests under your eaves. Here's a pic of my little caterpillar eaters. They will fill each cell with a caterpillar. Paper wasps are almost as docile as mud daubers as long as you don't mess with their nest and you don't swat at them when they fly around. I took this picture from about 2 inches away, and they clearly were not bothered by my approach.