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now is the time to think about planting milkweed if you want to attract or raise monarch butterflies. if you don't want to plant milkweed in your yard, maybe you can find some growing wild, although wild milkweed is now almost a thing of the past. the combination herbicides that are currently popular with farmers kill milkweed right along with the other weeds. the borders of planting fields used to be the best place to find wild milkweed. i have yet to find any here (clayton, nc). (alice, i saw some between your house and the shopping center in knightdale.) if you live here in central nc, the further west you go, the easier it is to find wild milkweed.

there are dozens of kinds of milkweed, some of which are easy to grow, and some of which are tricky. i recommend monarchwatch.com and butterflyencounters.com for lots of good information about milkweed, and also as a source for milkweed seeds and plants. i also discovered last year that what is called "butterfly weed," "glory flower," "butterfly plant"(asclepias tuberosa) is also a form of milkweed that monarchs love. it is also very easy to grow from seed, and pretty, not at all like a weed (common milkweed grows about four feet tall and spreads, so it's probably not for the small suburban lot, though though there's nothing wrong with strewing a few milkweed seeds on a vacant lot or the verge of a road that is not mowed very often). last year i would go out and pick monarch caterpillars off of the butterfly weed, like fruit.

what's the point of raising monarchs? the mortality rate for monarchs in the wild is 98%. if you bring them indoors and raise them, you can lower that rate quite a bit. some years mine has been 0%. last year it was about 15%. that's mortality rate, not survival rate.

monarchs love lots of other flowers, but that's another post.