After a few weeks of hand watering our new plants, we finally got a nice soaking rain tonight. Thanks to Jodi, we had a rain barrel to capture it so we can use tonight's water in the garden for awhile. This is the first real rain we've had since we put in all the new dirt so it will be interesting to see how things settled down. I am also a bit nervous about Fen Fen (the name that we gave the swallowtail caterpillar today) and how it did during the storm. That fennel plant looks so wispy; it's certainly not what I would choose to hang out on during a rainstorm.
Speaking of Fen Fen, I think it's a Black Swallowtail caterpillar. This is a cool website with some pictures of the different stages of development. In caterpillar development, each stage between molting is called an instar. What's cool about swallowtails is that in the different instars, the caterpillar looks different. A monarch has the same coloration but gets bigger and fatter. I think based on this picture that Fen Fen is in its 3rd instar.
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