Milkweed in October

Milkweed is one of my favorite photography targets in the fall and the meadow as Mt. Pleasant Farm is my favorite place to find them. The heavy rains last week washed many of the pods clean. Those seeds left in the pod got very wet and now are cemented into the pod

Or the pod was not quite open enough to let them out before the deluge (I wondered if the pod would split open and the seeds would eventually disperse normally with their bits of fluff carrying the away with a breeze).

There were milkweed bugs but they didn’t seem as numerous as in previous years.

The best pictures this year were the few seeds that had dispersed - a little – but were covered with small water droplets. The structure of the fluff is jeweled! The very last picture of this group is my favorite. It was draped over a dried seed head of another plant – caught there long enough to catch the dew and drape around the structure enough to hold the seed aloft.

There were a couple of milkweed pictures in last month’s post about the Howard County Conservancy’s Mt. Pleasant Farm. The milk weed bugs have grown!