Managed to get out to the garden with the kids today and did a little bit of fall clean-up. Today I focused on trimming the lily seed heads and collecting the seeds. From what I’ve read on-line, growing lilies from seed is a bit of a hit and miss project and I’ll have refrigerate these seeds for three weeks before planting and then start the seedlings in the spring in our cold frame. Some sites say that it can take as long as a year and a half before I’ll see any flowers others predict up to three. And I might have waited too long to harvest – hard to say.

What I did notice was that there were a number of invertebrates busy working on the seeds themselves. Most had a few small wood bugs, a token earwig (that scuttled off too fast to photograph) and an odd beetle or two. I’m not sure on exactly what kind of beetle this is. It’s probably fairly common and I’m sure that there are gardeners out there who have an idea of what it is. It definitely isn’t the introduced Scarlet Lily Beetle (Lilioceris lilii) but has a similar shape.

They were interesting to watch and A. got a kick out of counting them and the seeds. I’d love to find out what kind of beetles these are so let me know if you have an idea of what they are.