Butterfly Watching - Attracting Butterflies to Your Backyard
Creating a backyard garden that will attract butterflies for the best butterfly watching experience is fun for students and adults alike. Anyone can enjoy butterfly watching when the beautiful butterflies are attracted to your backyard. Some will hover over the plants for a while and fly away. Others will land on several different flowers and dip their heads into the blossoms to gather nectar. There are things you can do to attract these "flying flowers" to your garden.
For backyard butterfly watching you need to get the butterflies' attention with flowers that are colorful and full of nectar. Group three of the same type of colorful flowers closely together. You can find seed packets with a mixture of seeds with carefully selected plants which attract butterflies. Butterflies' favorite plants can also be purchased at a garden center and then transplanted in a sunny spot in your garden.
The best plants are perennial butterfly plants. They will come up annually so that you don't have to plant them every year, leaving more time for butterfly watching instead of digging. The perennials and the butterflies will come back year after year, adding to the pleasures of butterfly watching.
There are things you can do to your garden to optimize your butterfly watching experience. You can lure butterflies to your garden by putting some rotting fruit out in the sun next to the flower garden. When you are butterfly watching out in your garden, you will soon see that bananas or other overly-ripened fruit and a little honey or sugar mashed together is an attractive treat for butterflies.
Butterflies, like any other living creature, need water. Place a shallow dish filled with water on the ground near your garden. Puddling, according to butterfly watching enthusiasts, is when butterflies sip water from wet spots on the ground. Place a few stones in the water, and enjoy butterfly watching as the butterflies sit on the stones and drink water.
There are several things you will learn from butterfly watching. For instance, if you see a butterfly moving from plant to plant, but she isn't eating, she may be looking for a perfect spot to place her eggs. The plant has to be one that will sufficiently feed the caterpillars when they hatch from the eggs.
Milk weeds are a favorite plant for monarch butterflies to lay eggs on. For optimum monarch butterfly watching, go to fields where there are milk weeds growing. In your own garden, plant other butterflies' favorite plants to attract them to your garden such as hollyhock, columbine, lupine, cleome, turtlehead, false indigo, white sweet clover, pink clover and thistle.
Some butterflies prefer to lay their eggs on the leaves of vegetables like cabbage and carrots that you can grow in your garden, so you might want to plant some in a corner of your butterfly garden. You could also grow long grasses and weedy plants in a special corner to attract more butterflies for butterfly watching.
Part of your butterfly watching routine can include checking the leaves of the plants to see if the butterflies have left their tiny eggs on the underneath side of the leaves. You can observe as the caterpillars hatch from the eggs. As the caterpillar grows, it will shed its skin and develop a hard shell where it will stay a few weeks and then emerge as a butterfly.
Butterfly watching is always amazing and can be repeated every year at little to no expense. What fun to spend a bright summer day in your backyard butterfly watching!
