If You Plant It, They Will Come

Last year, we planted butterfly weed, milk weed, and swamp milk weed (all related plants in the Asclepias genus) in the hopes of attracting some monarchs. They bloomed beautifully and attracted a lot of pollinators. See the bee in the second photo? Bees and other bugs were frequent visitors of the bright orange flowers.

 

And then...and THEN the monarchs found us! We saw one caterpillar first, and watched it for almost two weeks before it wandered off, either eaten by a bird or exploring to find a place for its chrysalis (apparently they don't create their chrysalis on their milkweed plant). We loved watching it make its way around the leaves, chomping everything in its wake.

Inspired by a neighbor who raised their monarch caterpillars into butterfly-hood in an enclosure (and borrowing their cage for a few weeks), we decided to raise the other two caterpillars that found their way onto our butterfly weed.

We learned, among other things, that they produce a LOT of poop:

Guess Eric Carle left that part out of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Not sure why though--kids LOVE to talk about poop.

Then the special day arrived, when the first of our two caterpillars, Stripy, turned into a chrysalis. We actually missed the big moment but we know it took less than two hours from when we saw him last. First caterpillars start to curl up in a "J" shape and expel some sticky webbing that is what the chrysalis hangs from:

And then poof! Chrysalis. Sushi, caterpillar number two, joined Stripy about a week later. Sushi's chrysalis got blown off the spot where he mounted his webbing. Fortunately the chrysalis itself didn't look like it was damaged in the fall, so we did a lot of internet research on how to create a new mount for the chrysalis (spoiler alert - it worked, sort of!). And let us get some funny pictures of a chrysalis held in place with a binder clip and dental floss:

Fast forward 10-14 days from when they were caterpillars and the chrysalises became so clear that we could see the butterfly, almost ready to emerge, inside it (this one is Stripy, still safely stuck to her original location):

And then--BUTTERFLY!

You can see Sushi's chrysalis hanging in the background in this picture of Stripy, who we think is a female monarch because it doesn't have black dots on its lower wings.

Sushi emerged about a week later. His wing (because he was a "he" based on those little dots) looked a little misshapen, possibly from the chrysalis fall, but he did manage to fly away, so the rest is up to him/nature.

Back to the plants themselves. The first place that we planted butterfly weed clearly was not the place for them, since they fell into the sidewalk and driveway. We're planning to move them this winter to somewhere with more space, likely to the garden under the guest room window, that just got its native plant makeover. In a future post, I'll also show you the butterfly weed and milkweed that we planted in the backyard from plugs.

But our new obsession with milkweed (because LOOK! now we got butterflies!) meant that I decided to try to plant a bumper crop on my own from the pods. If nothing else, they were fun to slice open and harvest, and once the seeds were separated, the kids had a great time blowing the fluff around the yard.

I took seeds from slightly different times of the summer and from different varieties of Asclepias since I wasn't sure when they would be "ready." I know they need to overwinter in colder soil before they start to germinate, so we won't really know if it worked until spring. Fingers crossed!