Zebra swallowtail eggs are green with a characteristic reddish circle around them. Here's a picture - The hatchlings look more like specks of dust than caterpillars! Here's a picture, greatly magnified - Here's an early instar caterpillar - Zebra swallowtail cats move around all over the tree/bush regularly, so you might have some - keep looking. If I had to guess, I'd say your butterfly is a female, since her white stripes are on the thin side and her dark stripes thick - that's just a guess, though. Sherry

You have to get the roots of the invader out of the Zebrinus clump. If you cannot pull or tease them out, then you must dig out the clump and remove them that way. This should not effect Zebra's performance this season, especially if new growth has not yet emerged. If you do this, keep the plant watered (moist), treating it as though you have divided it. There is a more drastic measure: systemic herbicide, but ONLY if the Zebrinus is still dormant. I do not recommend it, but it can be done carefully by "painting" the blades of the invader with the herbicide.

Well, we got some rain a week or so back and now the foliage on my tomato plants looks pathetic. I guess it is that time of year any way, but it had been so dry that we hadn't had much disease problem yet. Well, we've got it now. Spider mites are showing up, but....it is July and we're having a drought, so I'm not surprised. Here's the latest variety report: These tomatoes have done well this year and I'll plant them again next year. They all have had good to excellent flavor. LARGE-FRUITED: Black Krim--excellent flavor, high producer Black From Tula--very good flavor, medium producer Black Prince--very good favor, average producer Brandywine--excellent flavor, low producer Brandywine OTV--excellent flavor, low producer Mortgage Lifter--excellent flavor but low producer Mortgage Lifter VFN--excellent flavor but low producer Better Boy--very good flavor, high producer Big Boy--good flavor, high producer Beefmaster--good flavor, excellent producer Early Girl--good flavor, excellent producer Celebrity--good flavor, excellent producer Dr. Wyche's Yellow--very good flavor, fairly large number of fruit Jubilee--very good flavor, lots of fruit, also very early for its size Nebraska Wedding--excellent flavor, although milder than most, takes a long-time to ripen Cherokee Purple--excellent flavor, productivity varies Arkansas Traveler--very good flavor, good producer Boxcar Willie--very good flavor Aunt Ruby's German Green--very good flavor Azoychka (flavor was very good, but plant has sparse foliage and seems to struggle. Still I'd give it another year.) SMALL FRUITED: Super Snow White (cherry) excellent flavor Riesentraube (cherry) very good flavor and very reliable Sweet Chelsea (cluster) excellent flaor Sun Gold (cherry) absolutely the best cherry Rosalita (grape)) (similar to the 2005 AAS winner, Sugary, in appearance but has much better flavor) Sweet Million (cherry) monster plant with heavy production and flavor that is superior to Sweet 100 Ildi (grape) simply wonderful Black Cherry (plum-shaped grape) very yummy Porter (because it produces in the August heat when not much else does) Yellow Pear (next year might be its last year here, as Ildi tastes so much better and has better disease resistance) WHAT'S NOT COMING BACK: Green Grape--bland Green Zebra--OK, but nothing special Lime Green--OK, but nothing special Sugary--not nearly as good as the similar Rosalita Sweetie Red Cherry--flavor is good, but not very disease resistant Southern Night--no disease resistance Black From Tula--poor performance in comparison to other black tomatoes with lower production and less disease resistance Delicious (if size were the only goal, this would be a keeper, but I like tomatoes with flavor, and this one doesn't have much) SunSugar FT--not as tasty or as disease-resistant as SunGold Sioux--nothing special Super Sioux--also nothing special Zapotec Pleated--the only tomato I've ever grown that I know for sure had Tomato Mosaic Virus Oxacan Pink--bland flavor Super Boy--plants produce round, fairly bland fruit in huge abundance but it had foliar problems from the start. If the fruit had better flavor, I might be more inclined to put up with the sorry appearance of the plant. Mexico--only average flavor German Queen--slow to produce, no disease resistance Old German--slow to produce, no disease resistance UNDECIDED: These plants have been slow to produce ripe fruit, so the jury is still out on them. In some cases, it is not their fault the fruit is late--they were planted really late or in the worst soil in the garden. In some cases, they were planted later than the others AND the others got big quicker and sort of crowded them. All of these will PROBABLY get a second chance next year. Cherokee Chocolate Earl's Faux Aunt Ginny's Purple Marianna's Peace Galina's Yellow Paul Robeson Kellogg's Breakfast Ceylon Marglobe Mule Team Russian Persimmon Opalka You know, it doesn't matter how good the tomato plants look in mid- to late-June, they always start going downhill rapidly in July. Between the heat, the common foliar diseases, and the spider mites, it is a wonder any of them make it through July alive. That said, there are some that seem stronger and better able to handle the typical July challenges. I'm at the stage now in the garden where plants that are really struggling will get yanked out and replaced with something else for fall. Overall the tomato plants have produced well. We eat tomatoes literally every day and have given away tons and tons. I'm not preserving as many for the winter as I usually do--but that's partly because I already have so much other stuff put up in the freezer and pantry. Dawn

Donna, thanks for your experience growing BZ. Since I'm assuming Carolyn would laugh me out of the forum if I sent her seeds for some grocery store tomato like this, if you want to play with this to grow I'd be glad to send you some nice seeds from it to compare with your black tomatoes. Can't beat the price ;-) If I were sure it were BZ or some non-heirloom I wouldn't want it, but since I never grew BZ before and it looked different (but not different enough) in a pile of what had the classic BZ look IMO. The seeds do seem to have had a thick green gel as the Black Crimean tomato. I'll grow it after all and see if it makes jagged longer zebra stripes like you normally see. Carolyn, As you've said, maybe the professor from the U of Ark was a Cherokee. Sevierville is 550 miles from me, so if I ever get bored I'll go Cherokee (tomato) hunting, if in fact the mystery woman and her neighbor were from the area, which is a little detail omitted from the description. That is a great study referenced in the link you kindly provided and I can only say you helped me beyond my dreams, so please know that I value your advice and am very excited to read your replies to me and everywhere else. My only wish is the study referenced had done more than apparently restrict research to specifically gf alleles, and had the resources to look at markers that could separate the varieties rather than the hypothesis of the single black gene. I don't know about you but to me there seems far more to this story and 5 "recent" spontaneous mutations doesn't smell right at all to me, and based on that argument I would think multiple gf alleles have been around much longer than to suddenly express this degree of divergence, unless something simpler would have happened to see it at the phenotype level. Don't worry, I'm going to read a copy of the original paper and get a more complete idea about their experiments and results. You are one classy oracle. Thank you so much. I promise to hold off on Thomas Jefferson (the man) until my head starts splitting LOL, this thread will not be about him. BTW, I heard TJ hid his Cherokee ancestry among many other things ;-)