Parsley, dill, and swallowtails

We've had a bunch of black swallowtail caterpillars thanks to our parsley and dill plantings. Mr. O really enjoyed watching get bigger each day. I think most of them have either gone to the chrysalis stage of their life cycle (though I haven't found any chrysalises) or they've been chomped by birds.

We used to have a rue plant that attracted these caterpillars, but unfortunately it was too attractive and the caterpillars ate the thing to the ground and it never returned.

I find it unusual that most of the butterflies I see flitting about the place are tiger swallowtails but I never seem to see their caterpillars.

Here's a young black swallowtail caterpillar about to chomp on some dill:

And here's a passel of more mature caterpillars going to town on the parsley. Interesting how drastically they change color as they mature

So what does an adult black swallowtail caterpillar look like? We haven't been able to get any shots of them at the farm, so here's a link.

Mr. O is 3 today

We've been neglecting the blog a bit but there has been a lot going on at the farm. Veggies are coming in nicely, including some new things we've either never grown or never had success with. We'll post about those things soon.

Today is Mr. O's third birthday so I thought we'd do a Happy Birthday post. Here's a great recent shot of him taken by Mr. Jon:

We've got a big birthday party planned for tomorrow - lots of his friends and some of our friends too. I like to think there's fun stuff for kids to do here and hope they all enjoy romping about. I'm sure there'll be a lot of swinging and of course some excursions into the chicken coop to play catch the chicken (que the theme from "Rocky"). I think there will also be a trek down to the creek to do some splashing and looking for animal tracks, minnows and crayfish. There's also the playhouse in Mr. O's garden village to explore. We planted parsley in one of the beds in the garden village and it did great. So great in fact that it's now full of black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars . I think Mr. O will be excited to show those off to his friends.

I'm also excited about sharing food that we've grown with our guests. We have some big tomatoes ready to pick that we'll slice up and put on burgers. We plan to have a pesto pasta salad with pesto made from our basil. On my to do list still is make deviled eggs from eggs that our hens have provided. There'll be tons of our cucumbers sliced up on the veggie tray (we really need to move the cukes people so please eat all you can.) I think the veggie tray will also include some of the bell peppers out of our garden. I have a feeling that there will also be some unauthorized blueberry and blackberry picking by the youngsters and that Mr. O might be the ringleader of that effort. We may even slice into one of the sugarbaby watermelons from the melon patch. They're not quite as big as the seed package says they get, but they have "yellow bellies" and make a hollow sound when you rap them with your knuckles. A lady at the farmer's market tells us that when the melon's underside turns yellow instead of white (hence the yellow belly) then they're ready to eat.

Here's Mr. O showing us where a melon is hiding:

Happy birthday buddy.

Swinging through bubbles

When our property was cleared and graded in preparation for housebuilding the guy who did the work left two good-sized trees standing in the backyard. It's hard to say whether or not he did this intentionally or if he just got close enough to being done and decided to call it quits. Either way they seemed like the perfect spot for a swingset and if there's one thing Mr. O loves to do it is swing. I think he would gladly spend hours in a swing if someone is willing to keep pushing him.

I had been trying to figure out how to safely attach a beam between these two trees that would be big enough and stiff enough to withstand a couple kids and maybe an occasional adult on the swings. I originally thought about using lag bolts to attach a 16' 4x6 beam between the trees but that plant didn't seem workable for two reasons - 1) I couldn't find lag bolts at Lowe's any bigger than 5/8" x 8" and, 2) it seemed like a 4x6 beam across a 14 foot span was going to have some deflection when the swings really got going.

After some internet research and a visit to Agri-Supply for some serious hardware I came up with the final plan. Instead of a 4x6 beam I decided to use tripled 2x10s for the beam. Instead of relying solely on lag bolts to both attach the beam to the trees and carry the weight of the beam I would use two 30" sections of doubled 2x10s per tree and lag bolt them to two sides of each tree to serve as supports for carrying most of the weight of the beam in a sort of cantilever fashion. At Agri-Supply I found 5/8" x 12" lag bolts that I used to attach the supports to the trees. I used three bolts per per support in a triangle formation. I also found found 3/4" x 12" lag bolts at Agri-Supply which I used to attach the beam directly to the trees. These are more for preventing the beam from moving than they are for carrying the weight of the beam. In order to get the three 16" 2x10s to act as one beam I nailed them together with 3.5" nails about every 6 inches along each long side. The second board was nailed to the first and the third to the second. Getting the first long board up and leveled was the toughest part of the whole project. Those 16 footers are heavy.

I thought Dianne and I worked pretty well together to get the beam up and secured. I tried to explain things as we were going along but I'm sure there was still some mind-reading required on her part to figure out the plan.

I'm happy to report that the swings are a huge hit with Mr. O and that there is virtually no movement or deflection in the swing beam.

Another thing high on Mr. O's list is bubbles. He has an automatic bubble blower that puts out swarms of bubbles. What could be better than combining two of his favorite things?