Monarch Butterflies-Follow-Up

The monarchs are here!

In November 2015, we worked on a monarch butterfly garden at our local nature center. The kids worked extremely hard on the garden-ripping out poke weed, prepping the soil, planting a ton of plants in the milkweed family, watering the garden and trying to figure out how to keep people off of the area. You can read about the garden building in this post.

Last spring, the garden did not come up! We were shocked. All of the hard work and nothing came up. Obviously, we did not have any monarchs visiting the garden. Imagine our surprise when after our hike this week, we checked on our garden. It is flourishing! The plants came up so well that we may transplant some of them to another area in the nature center. Now plants are exciting, but monarchs are even better! We observed a monarch laying eggs on the leaves. Next we will collect the eggs and help them hatch in a safe place. Unfortunately, monarch eggs rarely make it due to other parasites and insects. We are hoping to tag some of them too so that we can watch their migration!