Garden Visitor

Yesterday we discovered a visitor in our garden.  It was crawling on the patch of earth where our milkweed plant should be — our milkweed did not appear this spring, I suspect the unusual winter confused or killed it.

I hoped our visitor wasn’t too dissappointed that we didn’t have any milkweed.  We watched as he/she travelled over to the sweet grass instead;

Some of the children were concerened for the caterpillar’s safety and suggested that we should put it in a jar.  Instead, we discussed what the caterpillar needed to survive and eventually become a butterfly.  Somewhat reluctantly the children agreed that the garden was a better place for our visitor to stay.

Our native prairie plants have been attraching an abundant array of interesting visitors including ladybug nymphs and huge fuzzy bumble bees.  Now we can add monarchs to the list of visitors to our garden.