Butterfly And Wildlife Gardening And Photography» Meyer Lemon Plant

Leecy’s Lemons From Improved Meyer Lemon Tree

texdr — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 01:26:57 +0000

Each year during late November and early December, the Lemons on our Improved Meyer Lemon tree are ripe for the picking. If you live in the Houston area and are looking for a super easy-to-grow fruit tree, I’d really recommend this one. Other than providing a little fertilizer, we don’t do anything special for this tree. It smells wonderful from Spring through Summer, and during the Fall and early Winter, you’ll have large fresh Lemons. The Giant Swallowtail Butterflies also love hanging around this plant.

Leecy who’s always looking for ways to sell things, has been selling the Lemons for 50 cents and she tells me she’s made about $50.00 so far. Compared to the Lemons in our local grocery stores, our Lemons are about twice as big.

Today Leecy did our next to last picking. We only have a dozen left after these that she picked today.

Leecy's Lemons December 2010

How To Build A Successful Butterfly Garden Videos

texdr — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 23:07:23 +0000

I thought I would put together some brief videos on how to create a successful Butterfly Garden for my last day of vacation.

There are a total of 5 videos, each one is less than 2 minutes long. Watching these should give you a decent idea of how to start (or continue) a successful Butterfly Garden.

In this first video, I talk about how to buy Milkweed, what prices you should expect to pay (at least in Houston), how to tell if you have healthy Milkweed, and how to plant your Milkweed plants.

In this second video clip, I talk about the importance of having Nectar plants for your Butterfly Garden. I also show a brief clip of my Butterfly Enclosures.

By the way, some good nectar plants I recommend are Penta, Salvia, Purple Coneflower, Lantana, Butterfly Bush, and the Cigar Bush.

In this third video clip, I talk about some other Host Plants for your Butterfly Garden including, Pipevine, Fennel, and Citrus Trees.

In the fourth video clip, I talk about some additional Host Plants for Butterflies including Spicebush and Passion Vine, as well as what kinds of Butterflies you can expect to attract with the different Host Plants.

In this fifth and final video clip I talk about some additional Butterfly Gardening tools such as portable Butterfly Enclosures and long tweezers.

If you have any questions about these videos, where to buy plants or the additional Butterfly Gardening tools, just send me an email or leave a comment.

Hope you enjoy and it makes sense!

Backyard Fruit Crop 2009

texdr — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:16:47 +0000

For those of you who aren’t in Houston, you may not believe it but we actually had snow today! Yes snow! Almost 3-4 inches in some locations. Only about 1/4 inch stayed on the ground in our location. Because of the snow, we decided it would be a good time to pick all of our fruit off of the fruit trees.

Here’s the tally

56 Improved Meyers Lemon (down from over 300 last year)
2 Republic of Texas Oranges
2 Ruby Red Grapefruit

I think the numbers are down in the Improved Meyers Lemon because of the extreme drought we had this year. Even though the numbers are significantly down, the sizes of the Lemons are much larger. Probably twice as big as they were last year.

Oh, that little Apple by the Ruby Red Grapefruit is a “Two-In-One” Apple tree. We only picked 2 of those and they tasted terrible.

Improved Meyers Lemon Crop 09

Ruby Red Grapefruit Crop 09

Republic Of Texas Orange Crop 09

Giant Swallowtail Caterpillar

texdr — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:28:46 +0000

As I was looking back through this blog I noticed I had only posted 1 picture of the Giant Swallowtail Caterpillar so I figured it was time to post a couple more. Before I get to the pictures, let me share some history. In both my backyard and front yard I have seen the Giant Swallowtail drifting around. In the front yard it likes to lay eggs on our Mock Orange shrubs. In the backyard it will lay eggs on our fruit trees (Moro Blood Orange, Ruby Red Grapefruit, Meyer Lemon, Republic of Texas Orange). While we have seen the Giant Swallowtail Caterpillars eating on the plants, only once have we seen the Chrysalis. Additionally, every single time that we have brought the Caterpillars inside (to protect them from wasps), they have died before reaching the Chrysalis stage.

Recently we noticed that we had 2 caterpillars on our Ruby Red Grapefruit tree. Rather than bring them inside (since I have 100% failure with that) we covered the tree with a protective cover. So today we go out to check and see how the Caterpillars are doing, and one of them was absolutely huge!

Now on to the pictures. The first one is the Giant Swallowtail Caterpillar next to Leecy’s finger. You’d never guess that bird poop looking thing would turn into such a beautiful Butterfly.

Giant Swallowtail Caterpillar

This next shot is what the Caterpillar will do when it feels threatened. It pops up those big horn looking things and emits a spray (Leecy describes it as a bad fruit smell).

Giant Swallowtail Giving Warning