i bought a type of milkweed for monarch butterflies at a friend's nursery. i've been so busy i haven't had time to do anything with it except water. i'm planning on propogating these like mad in the spring.
out here, in the middle of nowhere - just one single plant, but they found it! the tenacity of these creatures is truly amazing. this is a big reason not to use pesticides indiscriminantly.
this has made my day!
I love monarchs. I haven't seen them since I was a kid though, when we did the whole "caterpillar in a jar" experiment in school.
You are a lucky bug to have them on your property!
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight. ~ Albert Schweitzer
From beasts we scorn as soulless,
In forest, field and den,
The cry goes up to witness
The soullessness of men.
~ M. Frida Hartley
Yep! Gotta love Monarchs!
I see adult butterflies at least once each year, but although I carefully allow milkweed plants to grow in my yard and garden, I never have seen a caterpillar.
Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads "Not Guilty".
I'll be mostly off-line until later this month. I'll miss you guys!
wow. must be a chemical so they can find it. I know cactus moths can detect CO2 levels, so they fly around at night and where there is reduced CO2 there are cacti sucking it in (other plants only do that during the day). As it happens, this moth (Cactoblastis cactorum) was introduced to Australia to control prickly pear during the 1920s after prickly pear were introduced to nurture cochineal mealy bugs so people could have the red dye (called cochineal, carmine etc) which today is still used in foods and loathed by vegans. Who the hell thought of using bits of a bug to make food red? ****en gross.
i replanted the milkweed from a one gallon to a 3 gallon pot, and i gave it a nice shot of fertilizer. it's the least i can do to be a good host to my guests. this has kept me smiling all day! they found it, and i can't get over it.
I planted a South African honeysuckle bush this past summer and it has doubled in size already. It has dark orange blooms all over it and is attracting lots of yellow butterflies. The cats like chasing the butterflies around the yard.
i need to plant it, though i think we had something like it in front of our porch. looks awfully similar.
it was so cool a couple years ago because there were about 5-6 monarch cocoons attached to our house. i missed seeing them emerge, though. i hope they keep coming back.
“Harm no person, animal, plant or mineral.” ☼ "Smile, breathe and go slowly." -both by Thich Nhat Hanh
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Wow! I'm so amazed at how they can locate the plant they need, even if it's just one.
“If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.”- St. Francis of Assisi
It's a miracle of nature, isn't it?!Originally Posted by papayamon
When I was growing up here, Monarchs were so commonplace, and now it's very rare to see one. The fencerows between fields cae down years ago, destroying so many animals' habitat, and herbicide use has cut down milkweeds to practically nothing. I've been nurturing all the milkweeds I encounter, and hope to eventually have a big patch of them where they're not visible from the road. (People already think that we're extreely eccentric, and I suspect that, if a patch of ilkweed were visible from the road, it might find itself sprayed with herbicide.)
What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents. RFK
an interesting twist to this little story. seems the catapillars ate themselves out of house and home. they are all just *gone* and the plant is completely stripped of growth. did other insects eat them after they destroyed their cover? did a bird gobble them up? i was looking forward to cocoons and emerging butterflies.
next year i'll plant a lot of this stuff so i won't repeat this disaster.
this has surprised me first by finding them and now again that they've vanished without a trace.
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