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Comment by pamelafox | Hacker News Reader

If any of you are in California and are interested in creating a habitat for Monarch caterpillars around your home, I highly recommend Narrow-leaf milkweed. It's one of the native milkweeds and its the favorite of my caterpillars (they hate Showy milkweed).

You can find nurseries with Narrow-leaf here: https://calscape.org/nurseries.php?id=434&showmap=1

Or you can grow from seed: https://larnerseeds.com/products/asclepias-fascicularis-narr...

I do both, since you can never have enough milkweed!

Here's a video of a Monarch butterfly recently flying for the first time after pupating on our Salvia: https://studio.youtube.com/video/edTgi7f1NlY/edit

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Will add, if you're buying from a nursery, make sure the grower they source from use neonicotinoids free soil.

I've been visited by so so many different butterflies this year. I'm in Zone 6B, central NJ. I planted asclepias tuberosa (mexican milkweed, orange flowers, medium height), lots of agastache, eupatorium (little joe pyeweed), and monarda. Highly recommend doing some research on natives.

Ah yes, good point, apparently some of the local nurseries have sprayed their milkweeds with some sort of pesticide, which means you have to keep caterpillars off them for a year. If you go to a nursery that specializes in natives, that's usually not an issue. In bay area, my favorite nurseries are Watershed and Oaktown Native, and they don't spray.

We've actually had a ton of swallowtails this year, which I'll admit are all over my non-native dill. I intend to plant Yampah one of these days, since that's the native version of dill.

Darn rabbits got my tuberosa. If you don't have Mountain Mint[0] (Pycnanthemum muticum) it drives all the non-butterfly pollinators nuts. I'm hoping to find some Winged Sumac[1] as it's also a big draw.

[0] https://njaes.rutgers.edu/plant-of-the-month/pycnanthemum.ph...

[1] https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=RHCO

I didn't know about mountain mint, this is a fabulous recommendation. Thank you!

I just bought these ones I didn't realize there was a specific species they prefer are these ones okay? https://www.amazon.ca/Caribou-Seed-Company-Butterflies-Germi...

Hm, so it seems like that milkweed does have a distribution in California, but is not one of the native ones. https://www.calflora.org/app/taxon?crn=9705 says it's not native, and Calscape doesn't list it at all. If you're in California, I'd highly recommend getting the narrow-leaf instead, if you don't mind spending a little more money. Also, if you can, plant some native Salvia nearby for them to pupate on. Salvia Clevandii does quite well. They'll also pupate on arbors, trellises, fences, etc.

Interesting. In my area (Southern California), the Monarchs seem to really prefer the Tropical (Asclepias curassavica). We plante it when a local Monarch enthusiast recommended it. Now that we're more educated, we've been gradually getting rid of it.

Ah, I never even attempted the tropical since it's not native, so I don't know how ravenous they'd be for it. I just contrast narrow-leaf to showy since those are the two commonly sold native CA milkweeds, and my caterpillars are just so incredibly not into the showy, it might as well not be milkweed.

We were pretty ignorant when we started our Monarch garden. It was 20 years ago, and there was less readily-available information.

Yeah, to be fair, I'm in that situation with swallowtails right now. I planted non-native dill, and it's swamped with happy swallowtails, as I didn't know about the native Yampah. Hope to replace the dill with yampah next year. Until then, the swallowtails shall have a dill buffet.

Working YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edTgi7f1NlY

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