u/redditvibes1

Think this may be some kind of long-horned bee? Very chill little dudes! Plentiful in my garden this year in New England, Zone 5b.

📸 on an almost equally tiny cosmo blossom.

A few years ago I got sick and bed ridden.

Shortly after I got better, I decided to dig a small pond with the hopes of attracting frogs & toads.

I hadn’t anticipated the future daily doses of happiness it would bring me to watch birds, snakes, frogs, spiders, squirrels, raccoons (low key could go without🙄), many other animals & insects of ALL kinds enjoy the ever evolving oasis I set into motion.

This year the waterfall is the best it’s ever looked & planted a bunch of year 1 native wildflowers around it that I started from seed!

As an extra bonus, lightning bugs were extremely plentiful on my property this year as well!!

So happy I got better & picked up that shovel 3 years ago.

Spot the fake rock test! Which of these is not like the others?

New England - Zone 5b

Don’t even know what I’m looking at (besides the few blades of grass).

New to identifying mosses, but moved some of this from a reclaimed raised garden bed to my pond waterfall.

Whatever this mat of plants are, they seem to be thriving after I moved them.

They’ve grown up so fast, now venturing out to torpor on lower leaves. Very brave of them, there were some assassin hugs and big spiders in those parts 😭

Found these for the first time today in a deciduous wooden trail on my property.

Started clearing a walking trail last fall and found multiple clusters of ghost pipes on the paths I made!

Very neat to stumble upon one of our few native flowers that doesn’t photosynthesize!

Checked my only butterfly weed plant yesterday & found 10 caterpillars.

My swamp milkweed is still first year seedlings… kinda nervous if they all make it to 5th instar that my one mature plant cannot support all 10 😭