Hallettsville Garden Club

04/22/2026

04/11/2026

Just a quick reminder while you're driving around Hallettsville for the City-wide garage sale, to stop in and check out all the healthy plants Hallettsville Garden Club has to offer at our annual spring Plant Sale. Here's a little sample below of one of the Salvias we have available. It's called Pink Pong and it is a beauty! We hope to see you at the Lavaca Museum between 9 am and 3 pm tomorrow, Saturday April 11.

04/09/2026

Hummingbirds enter a death-like state every single night.

It's called TORPOR.

→ Body temperature: drops from 105°F to as low as 48°F
→ Heart rate: crashes from 1,200 bpm to 50 bpm
→ Breathing: nearly stops
→ Metabolism: drops by 95%
→ The bird appears completely DEAD — stiff, cold, unresponsive

Why:
→ Hummingbirds have the highest metabolism of any bird
→ They burn calories so fast that without torpor, they'd starve before dawn
→ Torpor is controlled near-death — an emergency energy savings mode
→ Every night. Every single night.

Waking up:
→ Takes 20-30 minutes
→ Body temperature rises rapidly
→ Muscles start shivering to generate heat
→ Heart rate climbs back to 1,200 bpm
→ The bird is fully alive and flying within minutes of "waking"

The risks:
→ In torpor, hummingbirds can't flee predators
→ They can fall off branches
→ If temperatures drop too low, they may not wake up
→ This is why feeders matter — they allow birds to build reserves before nightfall

If you find a "dead" hummingbird on a cold morning:
→ It might be in torpor
→ Leave it undisturbed for 30-60 minutes
→ If it's on the ground, gently place it on a protected branch
→ It may wake up and fly away

1,200 heartbeats per minute by day.
50 by night.

Dead and alive. Every 24 hours.

That's not a bird. That's a miracle. 💚

04/08/2026

The caterpillar on your tomato plant is covered in tiny white things and you're about to pull it off and throw it in the trash.

Stop. Those white things are saving your garden.

The caterpillar is a Tomato Hornworm — 4 inches long, fat, bright green, eating your tomato plant at a rate of one full branch per day. You hate it. Understandable. She's consumed $15 of tomato production since Tuesday.

The white things on her back are cocoons. Each one is a tiny silk case containing a developing Braconid Wasp — a parasitoid so small you've never noticed one, so effective that she's the single best biological control for the single worst pest in your vegetable garden.

Here's what happened. Two weeks ago, a female Braconid Wasp landed on this hornworm and injected 50 to 80 eggs beneath the skin using an ovipositor thinner than a human hair. The hornworm didn't notice. The eggs hatched inside the caterpillar's body. The larvae fed on the hornworm's non-essential tissues — fat reserves, hemolymph, muscle — carefully avoiding the organs that keep it alive. The caterpillar continued eating your tomatoes while being consumed from the inside.

Three days ago the larvae chewed through the skin, emerged onto the surface, and each one spun a white silk cocoon on the hornworm's back. There are 60 of them. They look like grains of rice glued to a green sausage. Inside each cocoon, a wasp is pupating.

The moment the cocoons appeared, the hornworm stopped eating. Completely. She hasn't taken a bite in 3 days. She's not dead — she's standing guard. The parasites have hijacked her behavior. She sits on the stem, motionless, shielding the cocoons with her body. She's become a living nursery for the wasps that are killing her.

In 5 to 7 days, 60 adult Braconid Wasps will emerge from those cocoons. Each one will find another hornworm and inject another 50 to 80 eggs. One parasitized caterpillar produces enough wasps to eliminate every hornworm on every tomato plant in your yard within 2 weeks.

The caterpillar with the white cocoons is not a problem. She IS the solution. She's already stopped eating. She's already done. Removing her removes the 60 wasps that would have protected your garden for the rest of the season.

If you see a hornworm with white rice on its back — put down the gloves. She's already been handled.

04/07/2026

Our Spring Plant Sale is happening this Saturday, April 11, from 9 am to 3pm at the Lavaca Museum, 1205 N Texana. Subject to availability, we plan to have lots of plants available: new and different types of Salvias, Belleza Pink Gaura, Echinacea, Henkley's Columbine, Pink Firespike, blue and purple Porterweed, Lace Fern, Penstemon and Variegated Shrimp Plant to name a few.

We hope you'll stop by the Museum and find some of your 'must have' plants.

"I think I have enough plants, said no Gardener ever!"

03/05/2026

Every bird nesting in your yard right now has the same problem: she doesn't have enough calcium to build her eggs.

A songbird eggshell is 95% calcium carbonate. A female chickadee weighs 11 grams. She produces a 1-gram egg — nearly 10% of her body weight — every 24 hours for 6-8 days straight. She cannot store enough calcium in her bones to build 6-8 shells in a row.

She needs a calcium supplement. You have it in your kitchen trash.

THE EGGSHELL STATION:

MATERIALS:
→ Eggshells from your kitchen (chicken eggs — save them over a week)
→ An oven
→ A platform feeder, shallow dish, or flat surface near your bird feeder

METHOD:
→ Step 1: Collect eggshells. Don't wash them — a little egg white is fine.
→ Step 2: Spread on a baking sheet. Bake at 250°F for 20 minutes. This kills salmonella bacteria — critical. Raw eggshells near a bird feeder can spread disease.
→ Step 3: Crush into small fragments. Size: rice-grain to pea-sized pieces. Not powder (they can't pick up powder). Not large halves (too big to swallow).
→ Step 4: Place in a shallow dish or scatter on a platform feeder. Separate from seed — some birds eat calcium but not seed, and vice versa.
→ Step 5: Replenish weekly during nesting season (March through July).

THE BIOLOGY:

→ A female robin lays 3-5 eggs in 3-5 days. Each egg contains 2-3 grams of calcium carbonate. Total calcium needed: 10-15 grams — extracted from her skeleton, diet, and any supplemental calcium she can find.
→ Females actively seek calcium in the 2-3 weeks before laying. They eat snail shells, limestone grit, mortar from old brick walls, and — if available — crushed eggshells from feeders.
→ Without sufficient calcium: eggshells are thin, crack during incubation, or the embryo develops skeletal deformities. Calcium-deficient females lay fewer eggs and have lower hatch rates.
→ Soil acidification from acid rain has reduced available calcium in many eastern forests by 50-70% since the 1970s. Birds in these areas are calcium-starved. Your eggshell station fills a gap that didn't exist 50 years ago.

WHO USES IT:

→ Chickadees and Titmice: First visitors. Pick up single fragments and fly to a perch to eat.
→ Robins: Eat larger fragments directly from the dish.
→ Bluebirds: Actively seek calcium before first clutch (mid-March).
→ Barn Swallows: Visit calcium stations between mud-collection trips.
→ House Finches, Sparrows, Cardinals: Regular users throughout nesting season.

THE TIMING:

→ Start NOW. Females begin calcium-loading 2-3 weeks before first eggs.
→ First robin eggs in your area: mid-March.
→ First chickadee eggs: early April.
→ Peak demand: April-May (most species laying simultaneously).
→ Continue through July (second broods for many species).

12 eggshells per week from your kitchen. Baked. Crushed. Served. The difference between 5 healthy eggs in a nest and 3 cracked ones.

💡 Pro Tip: Add crushed oyster shell ($5 for 5 lbs at a feed store) for a longer-lasting, higher-calcium option. Oyster shell doesn't need baking and won't blow away in wind.

02/24/2026

They always have a great selection of plants and Spring vegetable plants to start our veggie gardens this year.

09/23/2025

VCMGA 2025 Fall Plant Sale, Saturday, October 4 from 8 til noon at VEG Pavilion, 283 Bachelor Dr. Victoria, TX. Card, check or cash accepted. Almost 2,000 plants for sale. WE have something for everyone!!

09/13/2025

Our Hallettsville Garden Club will be having a meeting next Thursday, September 18, at 2:00 p.m. We meet at the First United Methodist Church Annex at the corner of S. Glendale and E. Fourth Streets. A program on "Bumble Bees" will be presented by Victoria County Master Gardener Kathy Chilek. Visitors are welcome!

Send a message to learn more