Friday, October 15, 2010

Monarchs!

It's butterfly time again!

We were very excited to see monarch caterpillars on our milkweed plants again today. We didn't see any for a while (they migrate so they're seasonal) so we stopped checking for them, but a nice big fat one was chomping on the milkweed outside our front door today as we were leaving to meet with our homeschooling group. We couldn't miss him, and when we made a quick check of a few of our other plants we found several more. They are cute little bugs! Oh- we also found a queen caterpillar about a week ago. That's a new species for us!

The race begins to keep the little guys in fresh milkweed. I'm coming up with all sorts of new places to put it but they can eat it all down to stems in nothing flat, which means more emergency runs to the Home Depot garden department are in my future!

2 comments:

Maarit said...

When I was a kid, I'd collect monarch caterpillars in a mason jar and feed them milkweed till they built their chrysalis, then wait for them to change into butterflies. So beautiful!

Kim said...

Aren't they magical? We've been butterfly gardening for a couple of years now and we never get tired of it. :)