Peninsula garden

K gave a presentation at the UU Fellowship of the Peninsula and I discovered they had a community vegetable garden.  It included several varieties of sunflowers, one of them bushy with smaller flowers which were overrun with bees and butterflies: two tiger swallowtails, a silver spotted skipper, and a painted lady.  The profusion of bugs attracted Eastern pondhawks and a golden winged skimmer.  I didn't ask but I suspect the flowers were Jerusalem artichoke - Helianthus tuberosus.  Maybe I should get one from the grocery and plant it? The sun was scorching and there wasn't much breeze to move the sticky air.


When we finally got home, a palamedes swallowtail was fluttering around the patio, but I missed it.  There were buds on one of the new lavenders and flowers on the butterfly milkweed.  A female Needham's skimmer used a perch near the flowers.  And of course there were blue dashers.  Wasps worked on the mints.  I fished a lacewing out of the water but I think it was dead.  By then the sky was full of menacing clouds racing East while the temperature dropped. 

I thought I'd seen a hummingbird with a white crown and now I have proof.   Meanwhile, a cardinal learned a bitter lesson.  He spied a fat green caterpillar in the rue and found that it tasted nasty.  The caterpillar died but presumably some of its siblings will be saved as long as the cardinal remembers.   Blue jays took a break from the blueberries to have some bark butter balls.  Chickadees and titmice and a finch stocked up on seeds. 

Ducks joined a turtle on the lake snags.  An egret staked upstream along the far bank.  The chaste tree was nearly finished blooming.  A cicada killer zoomed all around me, frustrating my effort to get a decent photo.  Thunder rumbled and convinced me to leave the pool but very little rain fell and the sky cleared before sunset.