A Motley Monday in the Garden - May 19. 2025

This is an ornate checkered beetle.  I've posted about them before.  In fact, once was last May, and the photo was a beetle on this same type of flower, a lance-leaf coreopsis!  This is what I wrote about them then.  "Their lifecycle takes one year, beginning with a single egg laid near the center of a flower, flowers visited by solitary bees.  The egg hatches, the larvae attaches to the leg of a solitary bee to be flown back to the bee's nest, where it's deposited into a cell the bee will lay an egg in, add food, and seal.  The beetle larvae begins its feeding on the stored bee food, then moves onto eating the bee larvae.  If that's not enough, it moves on to nearby cells.  It will emerge in spring as an adult.  Then the life cycle begins again with a single egg laid near the center of a flower."

See the tiny bit of pink in the center of all that green in the left-hand photo?  It's Sweet William trying it's best to emerge from the wild spring growth of the orange mint!  The taller mint at the back near the fence is woolly apple mint, and the brighter green to its right is volunteer spearmint.  

This is one of the SpinTop® Mango blanketflower I bought at the FFA (Future Farmers of America) sale earlier this month.   

The other?  Not doing as well!  

I planted the FFA vegetables.  The left and middle tomatoes are their mysteries (missing labels) and the other, without the cage, is Sungold.  Sungold will need support, and can get quite tall (or long if the vines lay on the ground, tomatoes are vines and would crawl all over if left to themselves) so it's under the rose arch.  I put some bush cucumbers in the mystery's containers.

I bought a four pack of cucumbers, and each cell had two plants.  I left two together and planted them in this container.  I still have two, which I am offering to a neighbor, or leaving on the curb for freebies.  I planted lemon cucumber seeds around the Sungold.

Nothing tastes as much like a strawberry as one just picked!  This was Sunday mornings' harvest.  No pests have discovered them yet.  Let's knock on wood!

Yellow Emperor ixia.   I'd like to find more, these are from the Dollar Tree in 2019. 

Hold My Hand

This calendula has aster yellows.  I've had it in black-eyed Susans, but this is a first in calendulas.  Aster yellows is caused by a bacteria-like pathogen transmitted by aster leafhoppers as they feed on sap and transport it plant to plant.  It causes strange looking deformities, such as these small stems with flower buds growing out of the main calendula flower.  Once a plant is infected there is no cure.  I should have removed the entire plant, and not just the affected flower.

Artichokes are on the way!

I'll leave you with this video of ants tending to ant business.

Tomorrow's Tuesday Treasures will be about the City-Wide Yard Sale this past Saturday.  Unfortunately, it was unimpressive and, after the treasures of last year, a disappointment. Still, I did find some interesting and useful items.  Plus, it was fun!