You've sure raised my awareness, Catmint.

aww, thanks, Kyla, although that's hard to believe!

Well, I knew butterflies and habitat and stuff were issues but I sure didn't ever pay attention before to things like the BST cat eating my parsley, and noticing that cabbage white laying her eggs on my kale!

I still have trouble finding a lot of caterpillars. I can spot the BSTs, Monarchs, and Grey Hairstreaks, but the others remain invisible to me.

If you go ahead and grow some kale I bet the cabbage whites won't be invisible to you for very long, LOL! My kale! So beautiful one day and then, the next day, full of holes! And on one leaf, three fat green cats lined up munching away!

I left them there! Because I have other sources of kale and they don't, really. So. And they've finished and those plants still have good leaves on them. But the ones I watched the female lay eggs on, those I did wipe the eggs off because, enough is enough. And hey, they weren't cats yet!

I see a lot of munched places on a lot of my host plants, but I never seem to find any caterpillars when I turn the leaves over, except for the BSTs, Monarchs, and Gray Hairstreaks.

I don't have any kale, but I do have other hosts for the Cabbage White! Boy, are they prolific!!

Even those Cabbage White Butterflies are not as common as they used to be. I remember clouds of them flying around in the Summertime when I was a child. Long time ago.

Of course the caterpillars still manage to get into my cabbage crops. Always finding them on my broccoli leaves.

I usually grow parsley just so there will be a host plant. And I have different types of Milkweeds and Butterfly Weed growing in my garden. For nectar I have lots of plants including the fall blooming goldenrods.

Oh, I'm working on it, Rita! Gonna have all those things, or, well, some of them anyway, next year!

And yes, so many beauties are not so common as once were. Lightning bugs for instance (fireflies some call them.)

I have lots of fireflies in my yard. Keep away from the pesticides and they come back.

We have them, too, Rita, and the grandsons love chasing them around at night!!

Pesticides, never touch the stuff. They also need habitat, though, and in many places the shrubby growth they need is much sparser than it used to be.

Fortunately, here, we have them, but I could wish for more!

I love fireflies! We get lots of them twinkling away in the yard come June.

I have lots of shrubby growth to spare, Kyla, if you need some!

(That's me, jumping up to grab the extra shrubby growth and bring it down here. )

That's me jumping up and down at the thought of you coming!!

Still would love to have a swap next spring so we can all meet in person!

I have been thinking that very thing.

Ric and I would come if the date works for us. Always willing to travel to a plant swap.

That would be terrific, Holly! Would be great to see you and Ric, as always.

Holly, speaking of you and Ric, I just wanted to give a shout out to @Eric4home for his cool article on putting a sliding glass door on your greenhouse! It always takes me a minute to realize that Ric is actually Eric, but no mistaking that terrific workmanship (the photo helped, too--LOL)!

He is working on another article right now on the winterizing he is doing.