Give butterflies a chance
I started out pretty small last year, because I wasn’t sure how much work my new microprairie would take, and I didn’t want it to turn out so big that I got overwhelmed and lost interest.
Well, that didn’t happen. In fact it went so well, I am planning an expansion.
This year the focus will be milkweed. When I read that our monarch population has decreased by 96% in the last 20 years, (according to Doug Tallamy, Nature’s Best Hope), I wasn’t just shocked, I was horrified. Monarchs are the symbol of summer in North America. Flocks of monarchs used to flap through the neighborhood when I was a kid. It wasn’t unusual to see a monarch caterpillar or two hanging out in the yard, chewing on a milkweed plant. Now the monarch might go on the Endangered Species List.
Thing was, back then we had milkweed plants. Sure, they were considered weeds, but my parents knew that monarchs, or monarch caterpillars more specifically, eat only milkweed. So when one or two plants popped up in our yard in the summer—we lived near open unfarmed fields—we left them alone in the hope that we would eventually see those exotic-looking, stripey Monarch caterpillars, and if we were lucky, one would set up housekeeping in our yard and turn into a butterfly before our eyes.
Things change, though, and the American ethos changed. We started striving for perfection, or at least the appearance of perfection, in everything from our clothes to our pets to our yards. One result has been a war on anything outside the definition of a perfect yard. Anything that didn’t fit that definition has been labeled a weed and must therefore be eliminated—including milkweeds. Maybe it’s unfortunate that the word weed is in the name. When a friend of mine asked at his local garden center about milkweed plants, the guy looked at him like he was nuts and said, “What do you want that for? It’s a weed.”
A weed by any other name
Oh, but it’s not just a “weed.” It’s so much more. It’s a native plant with beautiful flowers and beautiful seed pods. And sure it sends out a lot of seeds, and they don’t always go where we want them to, but in the grand scheme of things, is that such a big deal? If it’s not in the right place, dig it up and move it or pull it up. Milkweeds are easy to grow. If you don’t want it spreading seeds, pull the pods off before they open up.
The important part of the milkweed plant is its leaves anyway. Milkweed plants have that name because if you break a stem or a leaf, a sticky white sap that looks like milk leaks out. To pretty much any other life form, including insects, this milky substance is distasteful and even poisonous.
But monarch caterpillars love milkweed, so much so that it’s the only thing they can eat. So I am going to see what I can do about boosting the monarch population with my milkweed garden.
The adult monarch, the butterfly, likes several different flowers, so I’ll probably include a few other tasty plants, too, like goldenrod and sedum, and of course I have all those coneflowers right next door.
I’ll be putting this garden expansion next to the first garden so the milkweeds get the same full sun. I’m going to start with common milkweed, because I can get as much as I want of it for free from my parents’ yard, but I’m also going to try to track down some of the other native varieties of milkweed, too. Besides the plain old common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), there’s also the swamp or red milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), the whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata), showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa), butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa, my favorite) and others. I’m also going to see if I can source some common milkweed locally, too. The soil in my parents’ yard is sandy and very different from my clay soil, so their milkweed might not do too well here. I’ll plant both and see what happens.
Sometime in the next few weeks I’m going to also talk about prepping the site. The point of my microprairie was to try to encourage pollinators by giving them a convenient food source, but now I’m also trying to follow renegerative agriculture practices that not only help sequester carbon in the soil, but keep it there. A lot of what I’ve read so far, though, only talks about farming. I haven’t seen a lot on gardening yet, the practices should scale down. In the meantime, I’m going to make it up as I go along using what I know. It’s mostly a matter of trying to mimic what happens in nature. The advantage of starting small is that any mistakes I make along the way have small consequences, too, which makes the microprairie perfect for experimenting.
Pretty soon I’ll be prepping and planting. Then bring on the butterflies!