Saving the Monarchs One Butterfly at a Time🦋

By Mairs Ryan, San Carlos Community Garden Monarch Expert

There are easy actions we can take to help Monarchs in San Carlos Community Garden and our home gardens. Helping grow the Monarch population by just ONE butterfly could help that ONE butterfly live long enough to lay 300-500 eggs in the two to six weeks of her lifetime!

What can you do? PROVIDE NECTAR FOR ADULT MONARCHS YEAR-ROUND

Below are easy tips you can use to help rebuild the Monarch population:

Spring and Summer

Plant annual flowers amongst your vegetables. Monarchs need nectar as they look for milkweed for their egg-laying. Seasonal choices include basket flowers, cosmos, sunflowers, bachelor buttons, hollyhocks and dahlias.

Winter and Fall

Don’t remove your spent vegetable plants; allow them to go to flower. Monarchs need their nectar to make it through the winter. Onions, lettuce, spinach, brassicaceas, and carrots are examples of vegetables that will flower months after your last harvest.

Plant winter annuals. There is a wide array of annuals that will last through the cold and rain. These include cosmos, pansies, nemesia, dianthus and marigolds.

Sow seeds of cover crops. Radish and mustard seeds provide nectar for the monarchs during the fall and winter while improving soil fertility. (Check out the Food Pantry Garden at SCCG to learn more about cover crops.)

Plant Mustard and Radish flowers for Monarchs during fall an winter.

Using cover crops, like Mustard and Radish, provides a vital food source for Monarchs and improves your soil fertility.

PLANT CALIFORNIA NATIVE FLOWERING PLANTS

Natives formed the original habitat of our region which makes them climate-resilient. Those suitable for our 4’ x 8’ sized garden beds include bush monkey flower, hummingbird sage, California fuschia, shaw’s agave, seaside daisy and chalk live-forever.

USE ONLY ORGANICALLY GROWN PLANTS

Plants grown with pesticides and/or herbicides poison the monarchs. Ask your nursery people if they buy from organic growers.

If they don’t/won’t give that information, be a monarch ally. Inform them that the monarch count is barely hovering at 2000; that they are already battling against climate-change, deforestation and wildfires.

PLANT NATIVE MILKWEED

Milkweed is the only plant on which monarchs will lay their eggs. However, do not plant non-native milkweed being sold in nurseries. The non-native carries a parasite of the monarch that can mean death. Non-native types go by various names, including Semi-Tropical Milkweed, Mexican Milkweed, Bloodflower, Mexican Butterfly Weed and Mexican Orange Milkweed - do NOT use these types.

Some milkweeds are beneficial for butterflies. Some are deadly.

(Photo courtesy: Ross May / Los Angeles Times; Getty Images)