Yes, patience is the key - but alas, I rarely abide by it myself :o) Also depends on what nectar plants you have...and what color the blossoms are. You have a great plan providing different plant heights - although the "eight feet above ground" is a tad high if you're wanting to photograph butterflies - but it will bring in those flying over your fence :o) Flowering trees are good for that too. Also depends on what's around your neighborhood - if everyone around you has nectar sources well, that will keep butterflies busy elsewhere. Some butterflies will stay within an area of about fifty feet - and you might end up seeing the same butterfly day in and day out. As for the ladybugs - I get them on my milkweeds and they control the aphids - have never noticed them eating any Monarch or Queen eggs nor any of the first or second instar caterpillars. Then again...might not be the right time of day or season. Some species prefer to lay eggs around 9 in the morning, others around noon or 1 pm and yet others late in the afternoon up to about 8 at night. If you have the book "Field Guide to Butterflies of North America - Kaufman Focus Guide" - it will tell you when the butterfly flies and how many broods to expect a year. Although Spring time is usually means the butterflies will show up for us the Fall season is the best time for butterfly activity. Keep checking your larval host plants - butterflies have a way of sneaking past you and laying eggs without you being the wiser until one day you look outside and see gobs of caterpillars happily munching on their host food plant! Will tell you I watched a Dainty Sulphur hone in on a single six inch pot of Tiny Tim (the only one in my yard) a couple of days ago. It took that wee butterfly less than 4 seconds to fly up to the plant and lay an egg. I couldn't get a photo of her ovipositing at all!!! Am sure you'll be seeing butterflies soon!!! Do you know what butterflies are flitting around your parsley and dill? Am assuming you are seeing Black Swallowtails since that is their larval host. You might be seeing males patrolling the area in search of females :o) ~ Cat

I agree that digging the bermuda out and then putting in a garden barrier to keep it from creeping back into the liriope is the most effective way to remove the bermuda grass from the monkey grass area long-term because if you kill the bermuda with a herbicide, since bermuda is such an aggressive grower, it just will continue to infiltrate the liriope over time. For a short term solution, you can use one of the over-the-top weedkillers like Ornamec or Fertilome's Over-The-Top grass killer. I just checked Fertilome's Over The Top label online to verify, and it says it kills bermuda grass. It also lists liriope (monkey grass) as tolerant of the product, meaning that when the product is properly mixed and applied following label directions exactly, the liriope should not be harmed by the product. I do know people who have killed plants with these over the top herbicides by mixing them at a higher rate or applying much more heavily than the label specifies, so be sure you are careful to follow the label directions exactly. Here's the label, which includes extensive lists of plants that shouldn't be harmed by the proper use of the Over The Top product. Label for Fertilome's Over-The-Top Herbicide

This early warm-up and green-up should make me happy, as a gardener, right? Hmmm. So, why do I feel so uneasy about it? Perhaps it is just that it feels sort of unnatural. Well, that, and the fact that experiences tells me we usually pay a terrible price in March or April for warming up in February. It doesn't feel right to have to be worrying about snakes being out in February for the second year in a row. I cherish the snake-free winter months when I know there is zero chance of having an encounter with a venomous snake. Having highs in the 70s through the 90s in January and February, at times this year---clearly not every day---means I've lost part of that worry-free period. Our yard is rapidly greening up. Maybe the bermuda grass will green up a lot and then get slapped down by whatever cold weather remains ahead over the next month or two. Weeds are erupting everywhere daily, and I'm not happy about that. People who generally rely on pre-emergent weed killers (I don't use them, so I don't care) may find that if they've waited until their usual time to use them this year, the pre-emergents may not be useful as the weeds already may have germinated. They sure have at our house. Soil temperatures are abnormally warm and, while gardeners greet each early sprouting of desirable plants with great delight, we need to remember the weeds are sprouting early right along with them. Cool season weeds and warm season weeds are sprouting simultaneously here in our garden. Tree, I cannot believe Brent put the pig in your greenhouse! I hope he hurries up and gets the pig its own house built so you can use your greenhouse. Fleas and ticks already are bad here. I even saw ticks in January. The bird population is huge this winter. Maybe less of them than usual flew south. We have six finch feeders and I have to refill them all once or twice a week, and more often than that if we have one of those increasingly rare really cold winter days or nights. In the garden, earthworms are exceedingly plentiful, reinforcing our decision to go no-till in the front garden, and there's not nearly as many grubs and cut worms in the soil as usual. Purple martin scout birds returned around Valentine's Day, which is fairly typical. We're always happy to see them. We have about 50 billion cardinals. If the old southern belief that cardinals are the souls of your deceased relatives visiting you is true, then I've got a lot of souls hanging around here every day, and apparently more deceased relatives than I ever knew existed---and they are feasting on black oil sunflower seeds in huge quantities. The early arrival of spring weather still doesn't mean winter is over yet. Let's try to keep that in mind as we yank weeds, mow the lawn, slap mosquitoes, watch the bees visit the early blooms and otherwise enjoy the rest of what's been a fairly lovely February overall. As soon as the wet garden soil is dry enough to walk on, I'll be yanking weeds like a possessed madwoman this week, and then putting mulch in place to keep them from resprouting. I'm not sure if I've ever seen this many weeks sprouting in February before, and that includes bermuda grass and Johnson grass, which are so early this year that it is ridiculous.

So, I'm back now to read thoroughly and try to respond. Amy, I do treat lima beans pretty much like snap beans except for planting them slightly later since they are heat lovers and I'm using them to fill that legume role after the snap beans are pretty much done. I have tried planting lima beans at the same time as snap beans, and in my location it doesn't work out well. Maybe that's our cool spring microclimate getting a bit colder at night than the lima beans like or something, so I tend to plant them about a month or six weeks after snap beans. However, I plant snap beans sort of on the early side to beat the heat and the spider mites, so maybe the limas just don't tolerate being planted too early as well as the snap beans do. One thing I do ponder is this: if I have snap beans, the spider mites are going to show up on them...sometimes insanely early. Why, then, do the spider mites not bother the lima beans at all? Beans are beans, right? I wonder if anyone has researched this. We are not big fans of celeriac either. We have tried it, but about the only way I use it nowadays is chopped up in a big pot of vegetable soup. I don't blame you for being mad at Wal-mart. Ours never has enough electric carts for all the folks who need them, and they've taken out the benches they used to have at the front of the store. I guess the benches got in the way of one of the little banks, or the vet, or the hair salon or whatever that now populates the front of the store outside the checkouts. I fight the blahs in dreary, cloudy winter weather too. I need sunshine! This winter has been tougher than most because the sun has been hiding behind the clouds almost every day, and often (I blame the warmer temperatures for this) we have had fog until noon. I feel like we've sort of had Pacific Northwest weather this year with all the incessant fog, mist, clouds and drizzle and I have not liked it at all. Jennifer, In my garden, beans as a group are relatively pest free, except that the spider mites really love them. Some years the mites arrive early and are horrible, and other years the beans pretty much finish producing before any spider mites arrive at all. You might see occasional damage from Mexican bean beetles. I will see a little of that here and there, but not enough to worry about. Some years, if there is a heavy population of stink bugs (like we had last year), they will be on the beans. I have noticed that southern green stink bugs are more of a pest on beans than the brown stink bugs are. I run across the green stink bugs on the plants when harvesting beans so I try to always have my garden scissors with me so I can snip those stink bugs in half. (Don't squish stink bugs with your bare fingers unless you want for your fingers to stink all day long, even after you have thoroughly washed them.) Because you have coyotes in your neighborhood, I would not have a miniature cow unless I also had a guardian livestock dog (like a Great Pyrenees, for example) to protect the cow from the coyotes. Or, maybe a donkey. Donkeys are great at protecting livestock as well and even will take on large dogs and cougars to protect their herd. Okmulgeeboy, I have grown a gazillion types of beans over the years. There are hundreds of varieties available commercially and it has been fun to experiment with all the different kinds. If a person is going to binge on something in the garden, beans are a fun crop to experiment with. I do not grow dry beans. They are so incredibly cheap to buy in bags at the store, or in bulk at some stores, that they just are not cost-effective to grow in the garden by comparison. That's why I don't grow pinto beans or black bean, and I always harvest our southern peas green, not leaving them on the plants to dry. I prefer to use the garden for fresh legumes that I can harvest weekly, and then either snap or shell, and eat fresh. We just freeze the excess for winter when I grow more than we can eat fresh and that is possible because we have three freezers in the garage, though all of them are not full year-round....one of them usually empties out as we devour our fresh-frozen food over the course of the fall and winter months. Then, as soon as the harvest starts in Spring, I refill that big freezer with garden produce over the course of the growing season. It is a big chest freezer divided into compartments by blue plastic dividers, so I fill each section with a different veggie, which keeps it organized and makes it easier for me to find what I want when I'm removing frozen produce from the freezer to use in meal preparation. Larry, That is great cow advice! Rebecca, I have hesitated to try to put words to how I feel about this year's winter/spring weather because I am getting mixed feelings about it. Does that make sense? I don't have a strong feeling that we will have late cold weather. I don't have a strong feeling that we will have early warm weather. It all just feels sort of "blah" in my brain. Good heavens, I hope I'm not losing my garden intuition as I age! That would be terrible. So, my best guess based on my garden intuition is that we are going to warm up early in general, but need to watch carefully for late rounds of cold weather. We aren't going to warm up extraordinarily early. You know, there have been some years when January was so warm that I actually put tomato plants in my 4' round galvanized metal stock tank in February...around the third week of February, and I did so expecting they would do well and would produce early and they did, though I had to cover them up on 2 or 3 cold nights. Well, this is not one of those years. It doesn't feel the same as those years. This is more of a middle-of-the-road year. I want to believe it will warm up early and stay warm, but there is a little voice inside my head (picture a miniature Three Stooges type guy jumping up and down in my brain, yelling at me to get my attention) warning me not to get into too much of a hurry to plant too early. Do I wonder where that voice is coming from, given than the signs around me outdoors have been hinting at an early Spring since at least December? Of course I do. I've learned not to question the voices in my head (hope I don't sound like a schizophrenic here) because they are coming from somewhere I cannot explain. I just know that when I follow my intuition, things tend to work out well in the garden. So, I'm not getting in a big hurry with anything, but I'm also not going to drag my heels too much and start seeds too late relative to the weather we are having. I have wondered if my garden brain is being lazy this year because I'm not planning on a big veggie garden? Because I'm rotating my favorite crops, all the nightshades, out of the front garden and replacing them with a lot of flowers as a form of crop rotation, am I losing my focus and not listening to my usual garden-planting intuition? I suppose that is a possibility. However, I am strongly feeling the urge to plant veggies even though that really is not supposed to be a part of my gardening in 2020 since I want to focus on renovating our landscape. I'll talk about that more sometime this week in the Week 5 thread as there are some rational reasons for that, and maybe one irrational one. So, now I'm thinking the front garden won't be 100% flowers and herbs. Maybe it will be 60% flowers and herbs and 40% veggies. We'll see. I promise that when I am starting seeds and planting and transplanting, I'll say so, and just by my actions y'all should be able to see if I'm feeling an early spring sneaking into the garden...or not. Early for me is much earlier than early would be for those of you further north, so if I start things early or on time, you all still have plenty of time to start things early too (and Jennifer is ahead of me this year, I've noticed, and there is nothing wrong with that--I think she is listening to her intuitive garden brain too.) My biggest fear as an intuitive gardener always has been that my garden intuition will fail, one of these years, to send me the right messages and I'll plant too late, but it really hasn't happened yet, so I try to listen to the voices in my head and behave correspondingly. This year, as usual, I expect to start seeds on Super Bowl Sunday....which is next week! Yikes! In a way it is sneaking up on me, but I already have seed-starting supplies and seeds on hand, so I'm ready to start the seeds next Sunday even though it doesn't really feel to me like it should be Super Bowl Sunday yet. I have one plant shelf set up indoors (long story) and the actual light shelf is going to be set up, hopefully today, in the mudroom, so it will be ready for next weekend's activity. Jennifer, I will go find the outlooks and link them, but the last time I looked at them, which I think was early January, they were showing February warmer than usual overall, and were iffy on the rain---no real hint there. At the time I checked them, there were equal chances of us having above average rainfall in February, average rainfall in February or below average rainfall in February. When they put up the EC on the map to indicate Equal Chances, I think that normally means their models are in disagreement so they cannot conclusively predict what might happen. Let me go retrieve the latest outlooks now. This first link shows the quarterly climate outlooks for temperature. Essentially, the tan or brown areas are showing above average temperatures, white will show average or equal chance type temperature forecasts, and if they were showing blue, that would be below average temperatures. Is it scary to anyone else that all the long-term outlooks consistently show us above average? Seasonal Outlooks Now, here's the rainfall outlook. Overall, I find the temperature outlooks to be more reliable than the rainfall outlooks, but since they prepare the rainfall outlooks, I want to post them as well. I'll tell you in advance that there is nothing in the rainfall outlooks that strongly hints at a wet year....and, yet, many of us have had a very rainy January, so I feel like there are mixed signals here. Quarterly Rainfall Outlooks Okay, I'm out of time and need to go make breakfast before it ends up being brunch. I'll be back later to finish catching up. Dawn