Gardening and being around my small urban garden definitely brought me some comfort during the long Covid-impacted spring, summer, and fall. A silver lining of being forced to work from home was being able to work outside some. Anyway, below I’ll just tell my story in pictures.

Black Swallowtails are not rare but they are just fun to watch, and their big fat green caterpillars are fun for the young and young at heart. In addition to bicycle tires, they like the fennel and celery in the garden, neither of which I had to plant this year. The fennel is a hardy perennial with a deep taproot that also spreads aggressively by seed. In fact, I had to start pulling fennel aggressively this year except for a couple spots where I decided it was allowed. The celery (which I mistook for flat-leafed parsley at the farmer’s market years ago) seems to be self-seeding and coming back each spring. There was no parsley in evidence in the garden this year.

We saw quite a few monarchs around. This one is on butterfly milkweed, which really started to take over parts of the garden this year. The monarch didn’t cooperate and spread its wings for a nice photo. This should be a host plant, but sadly we did not see any Monarch caterpillars in evidence. I feel good doing my small part in a small urban garden for this endangered species. We made a brief trip to Cape May, New Jersey in October during the fall bird and butterfly migration, and this is just an amazing thing to see – Monarchs just flitting by every few minutes, adding up to millions I would imagine over time!

Some other plants you can see here are purple hyssop (slightly past its prime) and the fennel just starting to bloom. In the background is the neighbor’s ornamental grass, which is interesting but getting completely out of hand. If I didn’t constantly hack at it my garden would be gone in a few years.

Here’s another (slightly more photogenic) Monarch on a sunchoke flower. The sunchoke, which I planted last year, started to get aggressive this year. I don’t really mind because they are shallow-rooted and easy to pull where I don’t want them. I did notice some squirrels digging them up in the fall and “squirreling them away” in neighbors’ gardens, lol. The sunchokes and hyssop in particular attracted lots of bumblebees which were fun to watch but did not cooperate for photos. Mountain mint was another plant that seemed to attract lots of bumblebees.

We had a bumper crop of milkweed bugs this year. They’re harmless and I think they are super cool, but I can appreciate they might be creepy to people who just don’t like bugs. This is what the butterfly milkweed looks like after it is done flowering and starts to grow seedpods. There was also a lot of common milkweed in the garden which I didn’t plant but leave alone whenever I see it. I notice that friendly neighbors and their gardeners tend to pull theirs, which I will not judge (in case any of you are reading this) but all the more reason for me to do my small part to support native plants and ecosystems.

Completing the butterfly milkweed life cycle, here the seed pods are bursting open and preparing to scatter their goodness to next year’s garden. The milkweed bugs are still around, but I noticed after about this point they just started to crawl away and scatter. I don’t know exactly where they go. The white flowers you can see here are garlic chives, which are super cool and attract lots of bees and harmless little wasps. They (the garlic chives, not the pollinators) are getting just a bit aggressive though.

This giant pumpkin vine just volunteered, probably as a result of throwing last year’s Halloween pumpkin in the compost. Either that or the squirrel’s who shredded other peoples’ Halloween pumpkins (we have learned not to put ours out too early) might have buried the seeds. It didn’t grow any pumpkins though, maybe missing some key nutrient?

The spotted lanternflies invaded Southeast Pennsylvania with a vengeance this year. This is an invasive species from Asia that is almost certainly here for good now. They didn’t do any obvious damage to my trees (including this Asian persimmon) but we will see what the future holds. They don’t bite, unlike the mosquitoes we had in abundance. We mostly worried about one particular species of virus this year, but others like west Nile, Lyme disease, and Zika are still around, and with climate change I will not be surprised if tropical diseases like Dengue are on the way. Can we apply the new vaccine development technologies to work on some of these, please?

We had lots of stuff in pots. From left to right here, Thai “holy” basil, Asian long beans, Thai “sweet” basil, sunflowers (“Autumn beauty”, which lived up to their name and I recommend, Thai jasmine. Lots of bell peppers also volunteered this year, but no hot peppers – in past years lots Thai red peppers have been in evidence.

Maypop was my “try again” species this year. With the last few winters being so mild, I am hoping to see it again this spring. The new species I decided to add this year was a low, evergreen groundcover called bearberry. I didn’t take good pictures of it, and anyway it is not photogenic at this point, but I have high hopes for its future.

And finally, the dwarf Asian persimmon turned a nice shade of orange to wrap up the year. It is 3 or 4 years old, and flowered but did not set any fruit this year. My other tree is a dwarf Asian pear. It had some kind of leaf spot and looked a bit sickly much of the year, but it did set a fair amount of fruit, of which the score was humans 2, squirrels the rest. They were good, and that is an all time high score for the humans!