I got seeds but no help for this Season.

I have found that the flowers of all the plants in the carrot family attract large numbers of insects including many types of wasps and hover flies, tiny beetles, etc. If you let the parsley and carrots flower in their second year they will be insect magnets too. In my yard the fennel, parsley, and goldenrod flowers attract the greatest number and variety of insects by far. It is fascinating to watch the swarm surrounding them when they are at their peak. If the swarm bothers you, but you still want the foliage for the caterpillars just cut off the flower stalks. The rue flowers are not as busy and it seems to be a last choice as far as black swallowtail eggs at least here. It is an attractive plant though and may get giant swallowtails to lay on it as well. Be careful when working with it though because it may cause some light sensitive skin blistering in people. I would make sure that the peat moss never dries out until the seedlings get a good start because once it dries out it is pretty hard to re-wet.

Yup, that is how they fool mother nature but also, the white is uric acid (just like bird poop). It is an anti-oxidant and helps them deal with the furanocoumarins in citrus (also found it the carrot family). This is where bartenders rash comes from, when they handle limes and the oil gets on their hands and is then exposed to light. Also, the rash you get from handling rue. If you don't want to bring them in, you can try sleeving them. There is a thread somewhere on here about it. -Elisabeth

I can't tell if your cat is an inchworm/looper, Siam, because I can't see the legs. There are many caterpillars that look similar to that one, with many of them being inchworms, but the one thing they all have in common is they they tend to be generalists, and they become small, plain moths. I wasn't familiar with C. intermedi, so I looked it up. It's in the aster family, and it sort of looks like a cross between a stokes aster and a purple thistle - the flower and even the leaves on the plant are beautiful!! Sherry