Butterflies!

Our butterfly garden has been doing very well lately: we just saw the first of the monarchs on our milkweed!

Last year Klenda and I planted a butterfly garden. We got the plants in 2 days before Oob arrived! If you are interested, the best place to get plants and advice is Butterfly Bushes.com although they can only ship to certain states. Based on the prices, I was sure the plants would be tiny, barely rooted slips, but they were actually husky fellows which took off with minimal attention (very good since Oob spent a while in the NICU!).

We tried to have a balance of host and nectar plants so that the butterflies would stay and lay eggs. We have rue, artemesia, fennel, and milkweed for host plants; and we have butterfly bushes, cone flowers, snapdragons, bee balm, hibiscus, and milkweed for nectar.

All that milkweed worked! We got monarchs! We watched the cycle from butterfly to egg to caterpillar to lovely chrysalis (monarch chrysalises are the color of jade studded with gold. I have no idea what compound a butterfly could make that would look quite so convincing, but it really looks like gold) to new butterfly. That was at the end of the season, so when "our" monarch flew off to the south, we knew he was heading for Mexico!

Today we visited Wings of Fancy again and came home with an idea for making a permanent puddle for the butterflies to drink (and form the bachelor "puddle club"), while not providing a spot for mosquito breeding. It basically involves digging a hole, pouring in concrete to make a shallow depression (hopefully making a mosaic around the edges) and then adding wet sand after the concrete dries. We shall see how it goes!

The trip should be its own post: Oob made "b-i!" (butterfly!) his sixth word. Choclo was entranced. Picture a large glass conservatory filled with low growing flowers, a few trees, a box of hatching chrysalises, and more than 1000 butterflies from 3 continents. They fly around at toddler level and like to land on your head. Come to think of it, we were all entranced! I do wish I had brought my camera! This butterfly was my favorite (picture from flickr): the Blue Clipper from Malaysia.

In case you are looking for butterflies in the garden picture, they took off while I was getting the camera...