I have not been keeping up with this, too well!  LOL!  This year, two milkweed plants sprouted spontaneously, by my garage.  We’ve have them grow there before, but really do nothing to encourage them, so they either come or they don’t.  Of all the times, we’ve had milkweed plants, I don’t think we’ve ever had a crop of monarch caterpillars, like we do this year.  It’s our own personal biology/science lab!

2 caterpillars - about 3/4 inch long
1 caterpillar - about 1/2-inch long
3 caterpilalrs - newly hatched today!

This is so exciting and we are out there all the time, keeping tabs on them.  We did research on the internet, to find out what the eggs look like and seen videos on YouTube to watch them hatch.  We discovered that there were lots of eggs on our two plants, so we have a lot of watching ahead of us.

Of the few that hatched today, one was so newly hatched, he hadn’t eaten his egg shell yet, and they do, since it has important nutrients for them to get started with.  Our leaves have lots of holes in them already!  These milkweed plants are in a shady spot, and don’t even have buds that would indicate they’re about to bloom yet.  I wonder if they will even flower, since most other milkweed plants seem to be blooming already.

Photos of the first two we discovered on 7-19-08:

They were only half-an-inch long, on Saturday. Today, 3 days later, they are about 3/4 of an inch and a little bit thicker. The front antenna are longer, too. It’s been fun watching them grow!

Here’s my July dishcloth. It was called Love to Knit, by Alice Imholte. I used light blue Sugar’n Cream, with US 7 needles.