What? There's a garden out there?

So, I've missed the last few Mondays worth of gardening posts. While I'm still trying to make stuff happen, it's demoralizing to be drenched with months and months of rain, only to finally get a nice day and discover that the slugs have devoured that which has not washed away.

Ok, maybe not so much with the slugs since I put up the copper tape, but you get my meaning.

I know that there are others out there facing the same situation. You know exactly what I'm experiencing because it's happening in your gardens too. I'm inclined to sit around an mope about it, but there's still time left to make something useful out if the soggy mess that is the back yard. Now is the time for the mid-summer regrouping effort! Sure it's been rainy and we may not get our own vegetables this year, but there's still some interesting things going on out there and I aim to find them.

Take these moths, for example. It's been a booming year for interesting moths at my house. We had a bunch of luna moths earlier this summer and now I have these two very cool looking guys. I only got the one good shot of this very strange critter before the camera died. I really thought it was an old oak leaf at first. You can see in my somewhat blurry photo of its profile that it has a very deep bend to it's abdomen. You'd think that something as weird looking as this would be easy to identify, but I'm still searching for its name.

My other interesting moth was on the mudroom door. It was no bigger than a quarter, but check out the wild color pattern. I haven't been able to ID this one yet either. It turns out that there are 124 kajillion species of moths in Maine alone. I'm going to have to invest in a moth book so I can have names to go with all of the interesting wings that are hanging around these days.