A couple of years ago, we grew a nice fluffy patch of dill in the garden. I always grow a few things that I have good intentions of using and then never touch. Such was the fate of the dill patch in 2012. But we noticed that there were several of these green caterpillars in there:
With a little research, we learned that they are Black Swallowtail caterpillars and we decided to bring one inside and feed it in our big neglected sprouting jar. We made sure it had plenty of air flow and heaven knows we had ample dill...
Then we watched and waited and we got a big beautiful butterfly!
So this year we were ready...we watched for the dill to grow and we planted parsley (which we actually do eat) because we also learned that Black Swallowtails are particularly partial to it as well.
You heard me...Particularly Partial to Parsley.
We may have gotten a little carried away... at one point we had 12 chrysalises in 3 separate jars.
You gotta know that is a lot of caterpillar poop.
We adopted several out to the neighbor kids...and we sent a few home with the McCauley boys.
We even found one on the leg of a plant stand in the piano room:
We learned oodles about the way that they eat and how they climb up a stick and get really still when they are ready to go through metamorphosis. We watched them curl into a comma shape and weave 2 stabilizing threads. We thought we would be able to watch them weave a cocoon....but we kept missing it! We wondered how they were able to do the spinning so fast. Then I was in the kitchen making dinner and a little wiggling in the jar caught my attention. I stopped to watch and called the kids in. ITS SKIN WAS SPLITTING OPEN to reveal the chrysalis inside!
Who knew?
Not us.
Soon there were butterflies hatching every couple of days.
And it was pretty dang magical.
And eventually we found a butterfly in the piano room.
It was definitely one of my favorite activities of the summer.
And you can bet we will be planting lots of parsley and dill next year.
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