Hi kids,
I have a quick question... Do butterfly eggs adhere to the leaves, or would they wash off when I turn on the sprinkler?
Suzy
Do eggs adhere to leaves?
Suzy - They have a pretty strong "glue" that attaches them to the leaf produced by the mother butterfly. Sprinklers should be fine for the eggs, but baby cats could drown from too much direct water. Keep an eye out for the cats and try to remove them before running the sprinklers over your plants!
Thanks Becky, Yeah, I'll keep an eye out for the baby cats, WHAT BABY CATS??? I have butterflies all over doing the happy dance and I don't see any darn eggs, much less cats!
I found the secret to sowing and germinating parsley -- go to the "seed germination forum" and you can see my post and the answer. Since it's a biennial, I started some this week -- packs and packs and packs of it :)) I am going to have a FOREST of parsley next year!
Suzy
LOL! Ooooooooooooooh ...... so the question above was about your "future" plans to grow tons of Parsley. I hope it's curly parsley, not Italian parsley. They find the curly far more superior in taste to other cultivars of parsley. (This is from experience.) And my parsley does not like a lot of water, so go easy on the watering once the plants start growing good. I don't know if they get root rot easily or what....but they turn yellow and die. With all the rain, I have no parsley left. It has all died since the rainy season started here in Florida. :-(
Yeah, I heard about that Florida rain from my friend in Melbourne. She said it's really muggy there, except I think there was some profanity involved in the description!
It doesn't rain here from the end of June to Sept, so the parsley should be very happy, but golly! it is so hot and so dry that the parsley, and everything around it is wilting that I have to water.
I prefer the curly parsley, too and I got some exotic kinds from the T&M Sale (and if they aren't quite exotic, at least they are named varieties). I am stoked!
Suzy
Eggs really do adhere to the leaves quite well!!! Found that out one year when I picked a bunch of milkweed leaves for the caged cats and was washing them in the sink and using a toothbrush to scrub off aphids. As I was rinsing them out and laying them on papertowels I noticed a couple of Queen eggs on them. So put those in a separate container and ended up raising two more healthy Queens. :o)
~ Cat
Well, that was my last thought on why I'm not seeing eggs or cats. I thought maybe i was rinding them off when I watered, but that didn't make sense because it does rain sometimes. Not this year, but sometimes :) Butthen I had never heard anything about egg glue :) so I thought I'd ask.
Thanks, Cat
Suzy
On rare occasion I see eggs that don't stick at all. But I haven't seen any of those eggs hatch no matter how careful I was to keep it on the leaf. I think they're all blanks, so washing them off wouldn't matter.