Nature is pretty cool!

We have found some critters along the way so far. Some we don't mind, and others, well....let's just say they are neat until they start eating my plants. 

While getting our soil prepped, I found this little bugger that apparently is the North Carolina State Salamander. (Didn't know we even had such a thing.) This is a Marble Salamander. He stayed here in the corner of our garden for a couple of days. I guess he really loved the moist soil over there. We did hunt for him before we started tilling the dirt and we were unable to find him. We had a couple of days where it got above 80 and the dirt dried out a lot more than he probably liked, so we are guessing he moved on to better places. 

Our first sighted pest. This is a cabbage worm. Butterflies and moths will lay eggs near these types of plants (specifically broccoli, cabbage, etc). This broccoli has only been in the ground for 2 days and already has visitors and chomping up the leaves. I captured them and we have placed them in caterpillar jail. No cabbage worms were harmed in this transition. 😁 The kids love these things so much, we are going to keep them, feed them our salad scraps, and put them in a butterfly house. Turning our garden pests into a fun science learning activity. We are going to watch them grow!

I am sure this will not be the last of our pests. We are certain it will be a long battle throughout the summer. We research for the best methods and try multiple things. For cabbage worms, we are probably going to try either planting thyme around the broccoli which these critters don't particularly like, or we will sprinkle some cornmeal on the leaves of the plants and the cabbage worms will eat these instead of the broccoli leaves and they will probably swell up and die. That last one is not really our preferred method, because nature has been good to us, but we also want to make sure we are doing our best to protect our garden.