on the verge

Last week, we were checking on some seedlings near the butterfly garden, and Lucia spotted a monarch caterpillar on the hose. We could see the leaves that it had munched, so perhaps it fell off to the ground and was working it's way back up.

Dante found a big plastic jar, loaded it up with milkweed leaves and we watched it eat and eat until it climbed to the top of one leaf, shimmied out of it's skin and made a chrysalis. Last year we'd taken one of these with us to Lake George so it wouldn't hatch while we weren't around to release it, but I think all the movement of travel had an adverse effect on the creature and it didn't ever hatch. This time we've been careful not to move the jar, and while the chrysalis has been green with the beautiful band of gold dots, tonight it has begun to be to transparent and we can see the butterfly within! So exciting! Somewhere I have a link to a site that has a blow-by-blow pictorial of the monarch's transformation so you can see more stages. But for now, I offer this blurry evidence:

Bullseye!

After the trip to the doctor's office to procure some antibiotics for his very obvious case of Lyme disease, Dante and I took some time to hit Belltown Hills Orchards for some cherry picking. Along the way, we stopped at Claire's to check in on her ducks -- who are all grown up already and beautiful, tho the long shot doesn't do them justice. They're very happy, staying together as a tight flock, in their stream.



Dante spotted and snapped this turkey by the side of the road as we made our way home.

the herb farm

Dante has been taking a new pottery class in Andover, which is just a hop, skip and a jump from Caprilands Herb Farm in Coventry. So we headed over to check it out while he was in class. The grounds are beautiful, tho in need of some care.

The scottish blackface sheep are a little overdue for a haircut. But so excited to get some grain they were leaping with joy (or surprise at our presence) as they passed by.

Lulu, delighted to be holding this 3 day old lamb!

The lamb had gotten separated from it's mother (who was fortunate to have gotten sheared), and we watched them calling for each other until the mother came running over to where the baby was. When the lamb nurses and is latched on and getting milk, the little tail waggles adorably.

they're here...

Remember the praying mantis egg case that helped us choose our xmas tree? Well, it hatched Friday morning. Hopefully we'll get some better pictures this weekend. We escorted the first batch of hatched mantis' out to the front garden bed, and released them under a hostal, so hopefully we'll find another adult again this year.

prospectin' fer diamonds

For Father's Day, the kids wanted to take Luke camping at the Herkimer Diamond Mines in New York. We'd planned a trip here last year, but it ended up pouring for those 2 days we'd planned to go so we never made it.

Basically, they use huge machinery to slice off pieces of the hill, and dump it here for us to scuttle through, looking for the diamonds. These crystals are unique in that they form without "growing" out of something else, so they have 2 points at either end. We found some perfect tiny ones lying on the ground, but you could also chisel or split rocks to expose some bigger ones.

the many stages of the pea

poking around lake pocotopaug