Turn your front yard into a butterfly garden

This is not a blog post about what you should do in the future, its what you should be doing right now. The title is a statement. You need to turn your front yard into a butterfly garden, and its easier and cheaper than you ever thought it was.

I’m new to pollinator gardens. I’ve had a vegetable garden in every place I’ve lived that could support a potted plant or more. BUT, I have yet to plant anything for the specific desire to attract and feed pollinators. Man have I been missing out, and if you are interested in starting one, you are too. I got into pollinator gardening in a class project and I took what I learned from the classroom back home to implement in our yard. You need two things to make this work, a reliable source of water, and native perennial plants. The water source is very important and should be a shallow birdbath or bowl that you keep filled up regularly. After adding a birdbath we had a small group of miner bees move into our yard.

These miner bees are solitary and dig a small home in your garden bed. They sometimes nest around each other but don’t form hives. We have about 4-5 that live in our garden and we have seen drink from the birdbath. These miner bees look a little like wasps from far away but are more small and stout.

Part of the class project I mentioned above was planting milkweed in the garden to attract monarch butterflies. This year my milkweed was mature enough that I planted it and I have had regular monarch visitors ever since. I also got to experience 4 caterpillars from hatching all the way to cocoon. Though I know that this process happens its very different to witness it first hand in your garden. The monarch cocoon has gold accents! My biologist brain cant figure out why it would be evolutionarily successful to have gold accents on a cocoon but they exist.

It turns out milkweed is the easiest plant to grow. It literally is a weed and goes to seed 3-4 times in a summer. Those seeds then grow fast enough to sprout and flower within a month. The Monarch and its lookalike the Queen butterfly will eat the milkweed leaves as caterpillars. A single caterpillar can de-leaf a whole plant but don’t worry. The milkweed will just sprout new leaves in their place. Once the caterpillar is certified chonky it will find a quiet place to form a cocoon, usually my vegetable patch, and spend several days turning into a butterfly.

You can buy milkweed seeds online for very cheap and plant in early fall. I sprouted my seeds in seed starter cups before planting. However, after my experience this season you could probably throw them over your shoulder into the wind then sneeze on them once and they would be fine. You will get lots of aphids in Texas, so I sprayed the aphids one time when I saw them with a diluted soapy water mixture. Try not to spray the leaves of your milkweed or you could impact your caterpillars.

Good luck and I hope to see some photos of your butterfly garden next year.