A Quick rundown on the season so far

Well what a whirlwind of a summer! After waiting through 5 tense weeks of rain, finally it has stopped. I just hope it picks up a little. Now the garden at home is too dry. Got through the rain wondering, where are all monarchs? I guess they were waiting to lay their eggs. Now it is eggapalooza!
The season started slow with only finding a few eggs to collecting 30-60 daily at work and home. I have to thank my seasonal works who are getting into the conservation thing and actively looking for eggs for me. We have milkweed at almost every park and facility where I work and so that makes collecting easy. I did this by design but also from an educational standpoint. Our facilities (park district) have kids and moms and dads going in and out all day, not to mention day camps! I want those kids visiting to say, I saw a monarch butterfly lay her eggs today at camp! We have a wonderful Naturalist that works with us and she does the bulk of the education. So anywhere I can help that out, make it more convenient.... I grow all the mw we use in the parks in our greenhouse so it is all pesticide free.
Oh and the nice garden club lady who dropped off a caterpillar, thank you. It will be well cared for by little Gwennie.
At home where I  raise these eggs into butterflies, is a little chaotic right now. We are in the tail end of a renovation project and I have no tables in the house. I can't wait to get my dining room up! I need a project space. The hatching boxes where the eggs go are literally on the kitchen floor.
When I bring eggs home, I  "process" them. By this I mean that I get a clean hatching box. I clean with bleach and make sure to rinse and dry well. I then place a paper towel in the bottom of the box and spray it with a little spray bottle. Make the paper towel a little damp.  The reason for this is too keep the eggs alive until the eggs hatch. After I get them all into the boxes, I count them,  make sure any funny looking ones get closer inspection with a jeweler's loupe.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00533VJSG/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=GRI0HJNXLA91&coliid=I143UQMWVJG2EK

Any bad eggs go out. I make sure there are no aphids or anything nasty on the leaves. Then I seal the box. This is important. Seal the box, make a hydration chamber so leaves live. I also open and close those boxes at least once a day to get fresh air in. You will want to see if they are hatching anyway.  And then you wait. When they start hatching, after 2-4 days,  I start putting new food in. Wash the leaves off and pat dry. I don't always transfer every tiny cat. to a new leaf. That would be too time consuming for the numbers I am taking care of. However when I had less than 100 I would definitely transfer them. I use the tip of a toothpick. Some use a paint brush.
Feed the cats and clean the boxes daily. Period. If you do not want a bacterial outbreak and cats dying, cleanliness is the most important aspect of this activity.
For my operation, when the cats get about an inch or so in length I think about taking them out to the caterpillar house. This is a structure built by my husband, Lee. It took him about 20 hours to build and believe it not, he used no plans. We deconstructed the old cat. house and there was enough wood there to reuse into the new one. He only had to buy a little bit of wood.
While out in the cat. house the cats are fed from large cuttings of common and tropical mw. They are in vases that are weighed down with marbles and the opening of the vase is covered with plastic wrap to keep cats. from falling in and drowning.
Then they just do their thing. Eat until it is time them make their chrysalids. They wander around the cat. house for a while and settle in a spot. When they eclose, I release them the same day.
So why do I do this, all of this? I definitely have enough to do over the summer. I work full time, lecture at garden clubs, but only a few in the summer. I have a large garden to take care of and other responsibilities.
I don't want to get all sanctimonious about this and say that I am going to save this species. I have genuine sympathy for the monarch and their plight. I do this because the symbolism of the metamorphosis is important for me. I think that this species is a good ambassador for all the insect world and why we should protect them. Except aphids. I don't like aphids. Oh and mosquitoes...oh well. Most insects are really cool and beautiful. And I do it because it is fun.  Although this week it is feeling like a job. :)
Next up I will address those insects that also use mw for their home.

The hatching boxes, only 20-25 in each

Out in the Garden

The "Nursery"

The large Monarch Waystation at work, cared for by devoted volunteers!

The first batch of cats. in the house

The first batch in the house

July 22, Drying out....

Hello Monarch Mommas and Pappas! 

I hope this drier weather is agreeable to you all. 

It seems to be agreeable to the butterflies.

I have seen many butterflies this summer at home and at work.

Not only have I seen many monarchs but I have seen many different species of butterfly.

Red Admirals and Question marks are having a really good year.

I am hoping that most of you are finding eggs and cats. now. 

The 6 weeks of rain we have had here in the Midwest (8 inches+ in IL), really hampered the monarch egg laying. I found very few. 

When the rain stopped 2 weeks ago, collection picked up. 

I am now up to 548 eggs and cats. collected. 

Do not be daunted by my big numbers, I have minions at work (my college summer workers) :)

They are getting into this too and they do a lot of the looking while we work. 

However, there just seems to be more females laying and more gorgeous milkweed than in years past. 

I really hope you are all having successes too. 

When I first started this endeavor, I raised maybe 50 in the first year. 

If you only have the opportunity to raise 5-10, just remember they wouldn't be here if not for you.

Have you all been seeing more milkweed around the area? 

There just seems to be more on the roadsides and vacant areas. 

Could it be all the rain? 

Could it be guerrilla gardeners tossing seed bombs around? 

Have you noticed no orange aphids on your milkweed? No?

I think an unexpected benefit of the excessive rain. 

Keep an eye out, though I have seen the beginnings of them.
Simply squish those colonies as soon as you see them.

You can rinse your plant off when you are finished.
Do not use insecticidal soap on your milkweed.

If you need to see what they look like refer to my blog I will have this update with pictures there.

Hello Monarch Mommas & Pappas!
 I am posting some recent pix for you to enjoy.
First up, caterpillar house just completed by my husband.

 These are just some of the eggs I found this week on the flowerbeds of common milkweed.

 This is where to look for eggs right now, on the flower buds. Try to take the single flower bud carrying the egg instead of wasting the whole cluster of flowers. You will be missing a seed pod if you do. 

Also caterpillars, they are well disguised inside the flower clusters.

More later! Happy Hunting!

Upcoming Lectures

Good Morning! Just an update on my upcoming public lectures.

People often ask me if I will be doing any public lectures because they don't feel comfortable crashing a garden club meeting. LOL

My first public lecture is this weekend...

If you have any questions email me at Hort4u@nerps.net

15-Mar  Monarch Conservation: 1:00pm, Alsip Nursery  St John, In 21-Mar  Butterfly Gardening Workshop: 9:00-12:00, Joliet Junior College 23-Mar  Spring Garden Clean Up:6:30-8:30pm,Oak Lawn Park Dist.,Oak View center 28-Mar  Butterfly Workshop: 9:00-12:00, Moraine Valley CC, Palos Heights 8-Apr     Bringing New Life to Older Gardens: 6:30pm, Munster Library, Munster, IN 13-Apr   Butterfly Gardening&Conservation:6:30-8:30pm,Oak Lawn Park Dist.,Oak View Center 20-Apr   Companion Planting: 7:00pm, Griffith Library, Griffith, IN 23-Apr   Butterfly Gardening/Monarch Conservation: 7pm Chicago Ridge Library,ChicagoRidge, IL 27-Apr   Tips for the New Gardener: 6:00pm, Lowell Library, Lowell, IN 20-Jun   Benefits of Diversity in the Garden: 1pm, The LURIE Garden, Chicago, IL 23-Aug  Butterfly Conservation: 2:00pm, International Friendship Gardens, Michigan City, In 21-Sep   Benefits of Diversity in the Garden: 6:30-8:30pm, Oak Lawn Park Dist., Oak View center 5-Oct     Monarch Season-wrap-up6:30-8:30pm, Oak Lawn Park Dist., Oak View center

Milkweed

Hello gardeners! 

It has been such a busy week! We had a blizzard here on Sunday, 19" and one more inch tonight. I am a little stir crazy, all I can do is keep looking at butterfly gardening stuff online to keep me sane. Only 44 days until the first day of spring!
One of my favorite parts of winter is my greenhouse at work. My 20 flats of trop mw popped last Friday and should be a good size just in time for the Earth Day event. We give away about 200 plants and 300+ seed bombs of common mw. So we will be making seed bombs in the coming months.

Today in the gh, I prepared seeds for cold stratification. Specifically, three spp of mw.  The first thing I did was to get some clean play sand, don't just pick up sand from the beach. There are microorganisms in there. Make sure the sand is damp. Next, get your seeds together, This year I am cold stratifying common, swamp and tuberosa. The topical does not need cold strat. I simply put a few handfuls of seed  and a few handfuls of sand in each 1 gallon freezer bags. Mixed them together. I  labeled the bags and dated them. They will stay in the fridge for  6 weeks. Before I store them, I place each bag in another 1 gallon bag. This keeps the bags from loosing too much moisture over the 6 weeks in the fridge
There are many varieties of milkweed for the Chicagoland area. These are my experiences with growing them. I would love to learn about your experiences in the comments section. 

The 5 that I grow, are
common mw Asclepias syriaca- a native to the Midwest, in suburban areas it will grow in vacant lots and disturbed areas. It is very adaptable, being able to be grown in a garden, it is not picky about its soil. In my garden, it tends to move from place to place from year to year. I think it is nitrogen hungry and when nutrients are depleted then the roots move on. I have no scientific data for this, but it is a plausible reason for why the plant moves around the garden. I initially planted 2 little plugs on the east side of my house many years ago. I thought it would be a good spot, out of the way, not in my formal landscaping.. yada yada. The mw had different ideas, felt it would be better on the west side of my neighbor's house. So it spread under the lawn in between and it became a great place for finding eggs. My neighbor was a very sweet kindergarden teacher who occasionally caterpillar-sat for me.  When the next neighbor moved in, she destroyed it. Even after I explained to her what I was trying to do. Who knew a florist could be so hostile? However, the first time she cut it down it sprouted right back and she actually did me a favor. I collected a lot of eggs before she officially killed it. Her property, I know. 

Then the common popped up in the front landscaping. Oh boy. my nice landscaping. Well butterflies are more important. Especially since I have changed my philosophy from just gardening for the flowers to gardening for the insects! For the past 4 summers I have had 50+ stems of common growing. Weirdly, I did not have that many seed pods last year. Even with all the spring rain. Weird.

swamp mw Asclepias incarnata- in nature, this plant thrives in marshes and places where the land is flooded  periodically during the year. It can tolerate a fair amount of drought too. The adapability always amazes me. It will grow almost anywhere you plant it. I had just a few of these plants in years past and it grew to almost 28 plants before I had to take some out. It is not a plant to put in the front of the border, which is where it needs to be to be accessible for the egg hunting. Then there are the aphids (I will get to that later) . My biggest problem with the swamp mw is the way the leaves turn purple in the middle of summer. I cannot figure it out. is it a nutrient deficiency? Virus?  In any case, the monarch mommas do not like laying eggs on it. 
The butterflies like the flowers a lot. 

butterfly weed Asclepias tuberosa the orange mw. This is a mw that usually has few eggs an cats on it. The whole point of monarchs laying eggs on mw is the chemicals in the sap that is stored in the cats.' body and the butterflies exoskeleton. This chemical makes the monarch poisonous to birds. Since the A.tuberosa does not contain very much of the poison monarch don't lay eggs on it very often but I do find them occasionally. I see bees and butterflies on this plant a lot. My experience in growing it has been varied success. The first few times I tried to grow it, I didn't know how sensitive is was to wet cay soil. It died spectacularly. This is a plant that resents wet feet. Especially over the winter. So plant it in well drained soil and plant lots of it! If most of your garden is clay soil, then amend a large hole for this plant. I recently planted a bed with only A.tuberosa and Liatris I cannot wait to see it bloom!

prairie mw Asclepias sullivantii- or Sullivant's milkweed. This is a new species to me. I needed a milkweed for work that is not too tall and doesn't run around the garden like the common. This plant is only 4' tall. So more on this plant after this coming season.  

tropical mw (annual) Asclepias curassavica I had a hard time finding any cats. or eggs in my garden until I started growing this mw. Then I started planting it all by itself in pots that I can pick up easily. Last season, it was 2g pots and 1 qt pots. It is a great plant in a pot, water deeply and the plants grow really big and seed well. This is the only mw that I fertilize.  Last season I was running out of trop mw to feed my cats. So I got a hold of some seedlings of trop. Once I planted these up and got them out of the transplant shock, I started finding eggs. It took just a couple of days for them to perk up and as soon as they were, the monarchs were all over it. 

One of the challenges of growing all mw but especially trop. mw is the aphids. I struggle every year with this. They are oleander or orange aphids. Last season was particularly bad, they even attacked the common and swamp pretty bad. To control I will not uses chemicals. I spray them off and squish them. If you squish make sure you rinse the plant off at the end. With the trop in the pots, I would pick them up and check for eggs then squish then rinse. I started noticing in August that there were quite a few predatory wasps attacking the aphids. These wasps are very tiny, normally you never see them. There were so many last year, I observed them actually laying their eggs in the aphids. You know that they are there because the aphids turn brown as the wasp goes through their life span. The wasps last year were prolific, between them and the cleaning did, the trop mw was clean by third week of August. So nice to see natural predators really working.
I hope this season the wasps return in such huge numbers!

Last Season wrap up

Happy New year to you all! It occurred to me that I forgot to write a wrap-up post at the end of Butterfly Season. Here is an overview of the whole season:
First let me explain that 2013 was a dismal year, I only released 50 monarchs and that was about all that I found too (eggs). So when planning time came around for 2014, I had high hopes that it would be better. It just had to be better. 
My goal was to release 300  butterflies in 2014. So I planned for more milkweed, especially tropical. I learned too late in 2013 that towards the middle of summer the monarchs like to find new sprouts of mw to lay eggs on. Not only did I plan to do that but I started out with more. All planted in 2 gallon and 3 gallon pots that I could pick up and check. I planned a new bed (really and older one that was in need of something new) With the help of one of the nephews, we expanded the bed under my last remaining Rose of Sharon tree. A surprisingly fab plant for hummingbirds, I have seen the occasional butterfly on there too. In that expanded bed, I planted 3 different blazing star (Liatris) species, the native ones. The reason for the multiple Liatris planting is that butterflies Love Liatris. The only problem is that they all bloom only a couple of weeks. However, the natives all bloom at differ times during the summer. So if I plant the cultivar Liatris 'Kobold' along with all of these natives, I would have about a nine week bloom instead of just two! I also planted Asclepias tuberosa, lots of it. I replanted another native area of my garden and expanded it because  the winter last year was epic in killing my plants. 

I started collecting eggs and caterpillars (cats.) on June 1st, exactly 2 weeks after my guru did. That is how it happens every year. It is a weird thing. I collected a lot of eggs and cats. at work last summer and my crew last year were kind enough to humor my caterpillar craziness. I could not leave any of our sites before I quickly  looked for eggs. They even found one chrysalis! They were very excited and I was so proud that they really got it. That butterfly hatched the night before Fourth of July and I brought it to our special event and released it . 

Speaking of work, I have been at the park dist for almost 9 years and I started planting butterfly beds from the start. My focus is on pollinator and critter friendly with a 60% native - 40% non native mix. Last winter I registered the two largest beds as monarch waystations  http://www.monarchwatch.org/waystations/ .  These are landscapes devoted to butterflies with monarch specifically being targeted. These beds have 3-5 different kinds of milkweed in them and many nectar plants. In the fall a volunteer and I expanded another bed using the cardboard/ mulch method. That will be our third waystation. One of the other waystations is adopted by a small, but devoted team of volunteers who are Master Gardeners. They did such a great job last year! 
By the end of the summer I had collected 1171 eggs and cats. Sounds impressive, huh?
Well let me tell you that the season ended better than it started. I decided that I would raise all the cats. indoors this year, partly because of all the rain and the temps were low at night. 

My bonehead move was bringing plants in for the cats. to feed on. I had a bacterial outbreak and lost hundreds of cats. I was devastated.  
The problem with bringing whole plants indoors is bacterial cross contamination. Cats. were eating the plants, pooping on the soil and crawling through the soil. Disaster. Once I removed the plants, sterilized every surface and brought cuttings in, things ran more smoothly with less caterpillar death. Cleaning the hatching boxes and aquariums everyday is a must. By the end of the season, I was wondering if I would have my 300 butterflies to release. I had less than, 100 by Aug. Then I started planting new seedlings of mw. 

When Labor Day gets near, usually I take a little time off work. I would normally be looking forward to releasing a lot of butterflies for the migration. As I planned my days and thought Butterfly Season was over, I was at work cleaning up a couple of beds near one of the waystations. I had, at the last minute in June, planted several dozen trop. mw plants to fill in some space. I suddenly saw a monarch and pointed her out to my worker (not a nature lover per se) he admired her and humored me.  I then noticed she was laying eggs! Awesome! Maybe I can get to my 300 butterfly goal! Over three days I collected a whopping 368 eggs and cats from that one bed. I think over that whole week it was the same female. At the end of the season I had released 442 healthy monarchs, most for the migration. 

The migration butterflies begin hatching around Labor Day and after. They will fly the 2500 miles to central Mexico where they will spend the winter in semi dormancy. In March the monarchs mate and star the journey to Texas where they will lay their eggs then die. It takes three generations to get to Chicago and beyond.  In the summer breeding grounds they will have 2 more generations and the last generation hatching around Labor Day is called the Super generation, the migratory generation. More on milkweed species in the next post.

The Liatris species I planted are starred but there are other natives that I will try to add.
*Liastris aspera button or  rough blazing star
*Liatris ligulistis meadow blazing starLiatris punctata dotted blazing star
*Liastris pychnostacha prairie blazing star
Liatris spicata dense blazing starLiatris scariosa Northern blazing star

So a little bit more about my operation: The first step to raising healthy monarch butterflies is to have plenty off food for your caterpillars (cats.)  I prefer feeding them tropical milkweed, an annual in my NW Indiana garden. I plant it in pots so i can easily pick them up and look at the undersides of the leaves for eggs. Don't forget to look at the tops of the leaves and around the flower buds.  Tiny cats. will hide among the buds. I plant about 5 seedlings in each pot. It was suggested to my, by a friend, that the monarchs sometimes like brand new baby plant to lay eggs. I potted up some midseason seedlings and it did the trick. I saw an increase in egg laying immediately. As of tonight my collection total for the summer is 1,157!

Once you know what you are looking for, collecting is easy.
The eggs are very easy to see.

When I bring the eggs in the house, they go right into hatching boxes. These are just plastic storage boxes. They need to be big enough that there is good air in there. Open daily to get fresh air inside. A piece of damp (not wet) paper towel goes on the bottom of the box. You must keep the leaf moist and supple until the egg hatches. 

This season I moved my operation indoors because the weather here has not been favorable to using my cat. house. Plus hubby promised to build a better one for me. So into the tiny utility room they went. I use 10 G aquariums on end to accommodate tall stems of mw and vases with small openings. I prevent cats. from falling into the water by using ones with small opening and I jam a wad of waxpaper in the opening to secure the stems and seal the water.

Sometimes there are too many eggs for my hatching boxes and I have to improvise. This is only temporary, once a box frees up it is sterilized and the eggs are moved up to the larger container. It is so important to not overcrowd the cats. Overcrowding  can cause bacterial contamination that kills. Clean your containers Everyday to prevent this. It will be necessary to move the cats. out of the box to do the cleaning. 

That's all for tonight!

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