Hummingbird Moth or White-Lined Sphinx Moth

Another gift this morning....a hummingbird moth or a white-lined sphinx moth. (click this link for a better look at what we saw this morning)

I heard this guy in the skylight of the kitchen last night but I couldn't get him to come down so I could see what sort of moth he was. This morning as I was sipping my morning cup of coffee, he buzzed right over to collect some nectar from the vase of flowers on my kitchen table. Can you believe that? We all watched as he hovered around the flowers and then up over the table. This was our first experience with a hummingbird moth and it was fantastic.

He flew up to the ceiling and landed in the corner. Please excuse the really ugly background for this beautiful moth. We re in the middle remodeling our living room and he landed right in the dusty corner where we are sheetrocking....of course.

I pulled out my Handbook of Nature Study and I was surprised to find that there is a complete section on hummingbird and sphinx moths, pages 320-325.

"The have long, rather narrow, strong wings which enable them to fly with extraordinary rapidity. ...Their colors show most harmonious combinations and most exquisite contrasts; the pattern, although often complex, shows perfect refinement.....Most of the sphinx moths have remarkably long tongues, which are sometimes twice the length of the body."
Handbook of Nature Study, page 321

This was a very interesting insect to read about and I will be on the look out now for more of them. I read in the Handbook that they especially like petunias, morning glories, and nasturtiums which are all planted in my new garden from the spring!

Another gift....thank you.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Can Gardening Fulfill a Neglected Need in Us?

From my Heart of Harmony blog...someone sent this post to me because they had saved it for reference. I wanted to make sure it was saved here on this blog for anyone who could benefit from the information and ideas. 3/20/08

After a long school year, the prospect of spending some time in the garden with my children sounds so refreshing. My seed catalogs have been well studied and I have a plan for my garden boxes. Each child has their own garden box and plan, seeds have been gathered, and the sun is getting warmer. Garden time must be getting close.

(Great Grandparent's house in Louise, TX)

Gardening is a tradition in my family, passed down from my grandparent’s garden of necessity to my parents gardening as a pass-time. Our family’s garden is for pleasure. My pleasure comes from feeling my hands in the dirt and the warm sun on my back. The children’s pleasure comes from watching the miracle of seeds sprouting and growing to maturity. Or maybe their pleasure comes from eating the delicious produce: tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, strawberries, bell peppers. There is something that connects us to the earth and its ability to sustain us through the miracle of seeds and plant growth.

I feel close to God in the garden. No wonder at this feeling, it was part of man’s first assignment form the Creator: To cultivate the earth and take care of it. [Genesis 2:15] We were created to live in and work in a garden. The garden can be a great place to sit and meditate on spiritual matters with sunflowers towering over our head or with the various flower fragrances drifting on the air as the sun starts to warm the day.

In addition to fulfilling a fundamental need in us and giving the satisfaction of growing healthy foods for our family, a garden can also provide opportunities to promote good habits. Children learn patience as they wait for their seeds to grow. It takes a great sense of responsibility to remember to carefully water the seeds and seedlings each day. Developing gentleness can be encouraged when learning to weed and thin seedlings. A sense of beauty is developed while watching garden flowers bloom and then as a handful are gathered to adorn the family dinner table.

As your garden gets started with all its greenness and blooming colors, why not pull out your sketching tools and find a comfortable spot to record its progress? Sit in the cool of the morning and take in the wonder of your garden. Draw in your nature journal the garden flowers and vegetables that you cultivate each year and you will have wonderful record of each year’s garden plan. Look for insects or bird visitors to include as an entry in your journal.

It is easy to get started
1. Find a spot in your yard where you can plant a 4' by 4' garden. I learned about this method of gardening from the book Square Foot Gardening. This method lets you have a manageable size garden that is just right for children as well as adults. The preferred method is to build a raised 4' by 4' box, but just marking out the garden with stakes in the soil works to get you started.

2. Decide which plants you would like to grow. You have two options to get you started. You can go to your local nursery and buy seedlings to plant in your garden or you can buy seeds to plant directly into your garden. We do a mixture of both. We buy tomato seedlings so we are harvesting tomatoes earlier in the season. We prefer to plant sunflower, pole beans, and pumpkins from seeds because they are very fast growing and fun to watch.

3. Get those seedlings and seeds into the ground. Make a plan to water and weed as time goes on.

If you are ready for something a little more special, you can check out these specialty gardens.

Grow pole beans that will grow up a trellis to make a secret hide-away for your children later this summer.

Grow a pizza garden that will give you many of the spices and ingredients for making a great pizza.

Grow a fragrance garden that includes things like lavender, rosemary, and thyme.

Gardening isn’t just a quaint notion. It is a forgotten satisfaction where we can introduce our children to the wonders of all varieties of life. As the family becomes acquainted with their garden, they are learning the inter-relationship of living things on the earth.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Black-Eyed Susan, Daisies, Tomatoes, Lemons, More

This week's garden update is full of colors and surprises. My daily watering routine is always rewarded with something new or interesting to look at and think about as I spend a few minutes enjoying the growing things in my yard. This is the time of year that gardening is at its best....all those hours spend cultivating and sowing seeds, pampering the delicate plants as the summer progressed, and then feeling the surge of joy as you peek under a leaf and see something delicious to eat or something to raise your spirits with its colors and textures.

Here are your garden treats this week.

Morning glories in all their glory. This is the color that they are in real life...a sort of radiant pink and the camera just enhances that rich color.


My Black-eyed Susans are just starting to bloom along the fence and they make me smile.

"These beautiful, showy flowers have rich contrasts in their color scheme. The ten to twenty ray flowers wave rich, orange banners around the cone of purple-brown disc flowers."
Handbook of Nature Study, page 523 (Black-eyed Susan)

This is a hover fly inside a wildflower. He is the perfect size for this trumpet shaped flower. I have been on the lookout for insects in the garden since that is the focus of the Outdoor Hour Challenges right now. This one I recognize from our fall study of insects.


This creature is my constant companion as I spend time in our backyard. She is always curious about what I am looking at and many times I have to shoo her away in order to get a good photo of something in the garden box. In this photo she is watching my middle son fly his RC helicopter on the lawn. She isn't afraid of it but I don't think she exactly knows what to think of it either. Always curious....


This beauty just started to bloom today. It is in a pot on the back deck and it came up from a plant that I had last year. Gerber Daisy...what a color it is!


Now we are to the edible update for the week. My patio tomatoes growing on the back deck are really starting to produce. Can you just taste the yummy sunshiney taste of these beauties? Next year I think I will grow two of these plants so we have enough tomatoes for everyone.


Last year my hubby bought me a lemon tree for the deck. He put it in a beautiful pot and it was loaded with lemons. We harvested those and then over the winter we pampered this tree through rain, wind, snow, and ice. Come springtime it blossomed like crazy and it smelled so delicious. Then the cold weather came back and I worried that we wouldn't get any lemons at all since the blooms fell off. Well, hiding under the bottom leaves there were some that made it through and now we have some fairly good sized lemons on the tree again. I think there are eight lemons which is better than nothing. :)


Hope you enjoyed the garden update for this week....so many things to share. I wanted to mention that I usually look up everything in the Handbook of Nature Study as we go throughout our week. Many times I am surprised to see something listed in there and then we take the time to read and discuss the information. It just seems so natural to find something we are interested in and then learn more about it when it is fresh in our mind. Even though the focus this week is on insects for the Outdoor Hour Challenge, many other subjects come up and we take that opportunity to learn about them too.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Chasing Butterflies -Outdoor Hour Challenge #22

You really need to click to enlarge this photo....look at the eye!

Today we went out to look for butterflies. We were optimistic. We persevered. We were rewarded.

I can't tell you how much it helps to focus on a particular aspect of nature as outlined in the Outdoor Hour Challenges. If you had asked me if there were butterflies in our backyard, I would have said a definite maybe. We see them from time to time fluttering in the garden but they move pretty fast and we don't get to spend a lot of time observing any one particular butterfly.....usually.

Today we sat out and watched and right away I saw a cabbage white skipping across the clover in the grass, not really sitting but flitting from blade to blade and then off he went. Next we saw what I think was a swallowtail of some sort. I am totally guessing and I say swallowtail because that is one type of butterfly we frequently have in our backyard. He was there and then he was gone way too fast. Then, after much sitting and focusing our eyes on the garden, we saw the best subject of the day. It was a fiery skipper. He sat on a bloom of the butterfly bush and we got to look at him closely. I went to get the camera. A few minutes later, he was back again and this time I was able to take the photo at the top of this entry. Fantastic!!!

The lesson of this blog entry. Pick your focus and be patient. I am ready and anxious to take some more time to go out with the boys and wait for butterflies.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Textures and Colors of the Garden

Just enjoy the beauty of color and texture today.

Bee on a coneflower.



Sunflower opening up.



Coleus colors.


Leaf that was a snack for little finches.


Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Morning Glory, Day Lily, and Lots of Plums

This post is especially for Jen at My Nature Journal. She was talking about how her morning glories were growing nicely and that they had lots of nice leaves but no blooms yet. I told her mine wasn't blooming either but this evening when I was watering, I discovered this bud that looks like at any moment it will be my first *ever* morning glory bloom. I planted pink ones and blue ones so this is the pink one I am sure. I will post what it looks like when it does open up.


This is my new day lily. It is called Shenandoah and I love the way it looks like it has yellow and white stripes. This is the first bloom on this plant too! The katydids and bees really are attracted to this flower.


I haven't ventured out to our back, back yard in a month or so and I did not realize that we had so many plums on our tree. It is so loaded that I am afraid the limbs will break. I am going to have the boys prop the limbs up this week and hopefully that will save the fruit and the tree. I think I should plan on making some plum jelly later next month, what do you think?

Well, that is a quick glance around the garden this evening. I'm sure I will have more to report later in the week.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Pumpkins, Sunflowers, Chicory, Queen Anne's Lace and More

Early morning ramblings through my garden......


Our pumpkins are growing several inches per day now and they are blooming with such a vibrant orange color. I love the shape of this blossom and the ants love the taste apparently.


Look at that vine go! I can't even remember what kind of pumpkins we planted but we are enjoying the vines and blossoms in the meantime.


The sunflowers are all popping open, a few each day. This one has so much pollen that it is spilling out onto the adjacent leaf. Look at it all.



Here is our wildflower of the week, chicory. Melissa at In the Sparrow's Nest shared her chicory last week and it reminded me to go out and take a photo of ours.


Our neighbor has a whole yard full of Queen Anne's Lace and I went over early this morning to take a few photos. So pretty and delicate.


Here is a photo of what his yard looks like......pity he will soon come and mow it all down because he thinks it is "weeds". I will enjoy it while it lasts.

That is just a quick look at what is going on in the garden this morning. We are going to start our nature journal page challenge this week and get a few done.

Don't forget to come to the blog and look in the sidebar for the Outdoor Hour Photo of the Week! Also if you are interested in a Summer Nature Walk notebooking page, you can find it here on my daughter's blog.

I also am going to try to post this week about how to identify insects using the internet and a field guide if you are interested.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Weather Forecast: HOT!

Bad news: Temperatures to be at near record highs of near 106 degrees today, possibly up to 115 degrees. Air quality is extremely unhealthy because of all the wildfires still burning in our area. The smoke seems to come and go with the heat and breeze but it is just amazing how much smoke has settled in our area of the world.

Good news: My garden loves the heat!!!

"A child who makes a garden, and then becomes intimate with the plants he cultivates, and comes to understand the interrelation of the various forms of life which he finds in his garden, has progressed far in the fundamental knowledge of nature's ways as well as in a practical knowledge of agriculture."
Handbook of Nature Study, page 20 in the section "Gardening and Nature Study"

Here is our progress:

Pumpkin blossom


Sunflower ready to burst open

Look at the height on these sunflowers...no matter that they were supposed to be a dwarf size so they wouldn't cover my window. I have enjoyed viewing them through the window as I work at my desk.

Coneflowers blooming all over the garden.

My precious kitty who is too HOT in this weather and lounges around anywhere it is cool and damp which this morning was in the shade on the grass.

Tomatoes getting bigger by the day.

Green beans that are climbing as high as possible.

Day lilies blooming in a variety of colors and shapes. I love the pollen on this flower.


More strawberries to come!


So much more but I will finish there for today. I wholeheartedly agree with the quote from the Handbook that I shared at the beginning of this blog entry. Children gain so much from gardening...adults too. I think it not only teaches them many practical skills but it contributes to their emotional well-being. Besides, all those fresh veggies make our bodies healthy too!

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

First Sunflower Blooming For the Year

I was surprised to find this sunflower starting to bloom today. It just burst open with this beautiful, bright yellow blossom. The textures are unbelievable. This particular sunflower was not one that I planted but it decided to sprout up near the birdfeeder, I'm assuming from spilled seed.


Sometimes we cannot plan for the little joys in life, they come to us.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Gardening in June

Just some photos from the garden this morning. The hummingbirds are out and chasing each other.....I keep telling them there is enough for everyone. The garden is growing quickly with the heat we are having this week.

Summer must be here.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom