Ever since we did the butterfly experiment on Kauai I have wanted to find a way to watch more monarchs make their great change. We have a small flower garden area in the back yard that I thought might be a great spot to try to create a butterfly garden. The only place a monarch caterpillar will lay it's eggs is on milkweed. It turns out milkweed is a difficult plant to find. I had to order mine from monarchwatch.org. I planted it in the late spring. It didn't look like much. Actually, it died. Then out of the roots of the dead milkweed new milkweed grew. The new plants limped along all summer. One day, out of the blue, I glanced down at my sad little plants and saw a caterpillar. I pretty much started yelling with excitement. Then, to make it even better, I spotted a second caterpillar on a second plant. The caterpillars were gone the next day, but we found one of them hanging upside down under our table a few days later. We watched it go from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. Good story until I found aphids all over my now beloved milkweed. I sprayed it to kill the aphids and it killed the plants. Maybe I will get new ones out of the dead ones again?
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