The Big Green...

Sario adventures with the Datura plant!

If you all remember, I have a "Datura Stramonium" growing in my front yar-dirt.  I've been so fascinated by this plant!  It popped up and grew quickly into a large, leafy beauty with big white trumpet flowers that blossomed every morning and died every afternoon with nearly no water or care at all!  One day as I was out inspecting my plant, I noticed these little green balls attached to the leaves.  Suspecting that they were some sort of egg, I pulled off as many as I could find every day for about a week.  Eventually I lost interest and decided that it might be more fun to actually see what they were.

Low and behold, the green dots WERE eggs!  After just a couple of days without mothering my Datura plant I noticed several chewed up leaves. As i began searching the leaves for the culprit I noticed tiny little green worms!  Well, I'm not sure if they are called worms or caterpillars but oh how cute I thought they were.  Did I pick them off and squish them?  No way!  Let the adventure continue!

About a week went by without paying any interest to the Datura at all.  One evening my husband mentioned to me that my weed didn't look like it was doing so well.  I proceeded to tell him (rather snobbishly) that it always looks that way in the afternoon because the white flowers have wilted and shriveled into brown blobs from the hot afternoon sun.  Little did I know that my dear sweet husband was very seriously right!  Saturday morning as I went out to water my lovely succulent garden (I'm hoping to introduce them on my blog soon!), I was greeted with this:
 

AND THIS:

 

Those sweet little green wormies had eaten the ENTIRE plant and had grown into enormous tomato worms!  There were two of these big boys inching across the gravel toward the unknown.  Afraid that they would climb up my husband's truck and try to make a cocoon in there only to get squished the next day, I snatched them up and we began our search for a better home for them.  

After seeing mommy holding them the kids decided they wanted a try.  The little claw feet were a little too creepy for their sweet soft hands so Willy came up with the great idea of letting it climb on his shirt.  If you ask me that is a lot creepier, but I was just glad to see that they wanted to experience them too.  (Notice Will is not in any of these photos.  He decided he was much more comfortable taking pictures than holding a big creepy crawly green thing! Haha!)

 

After we were done letting the big

green worm thing crawl on us we found a nice leafy tree nearby and sent him on his way (still assuming at this point that he would find a twig and make a cocoon while hanging from it, like a butterfly). 

He looked pretty happy up there in that tree.  I was certain we would be able to check on him and watch the process of him turning into a winged thing.

This was worm #2 which I decided to put over near my succulents.  He wasn't super happy there though and ended up back on the gravel heading towards nowhere land.  I thought this picture was interesting though.  Take a look at the big spike on his rear end.  I will mention it later.

After sending these two off I refocused my attention on the now bare and scraggly datura.  Much to my surprise (and delight at this point since we were having a wonderful and educational Saturday adventure!) there were several more worms that weren't quite full enough to leave home.

They ate all the way down to the stalk.  So amazing!

Willy and I decided to check out another datura plant that was a little further out on our property.  It looked like it still had leaves on it and we wanted to see if there were any eggs or worms on it.  There were!!  We were so happy!  Stay tuned for Part 2!!