🌿 Where to FIND Monarch Eggs + UNPLANNED Milkweed Patch❓🤯

Happy Sunday Good GROWer,

it’s been a great week for the garden as mother nature has continued to rain down us with another 2” of soaking 💧💧💧

Many of our summer star nectar plants are beginning to bloom (including Mexican sunflowers) and the pollinators are taking notice…

🌿 Plant STARS of the Week 🌺

So what’s growing on in the garden this week?

• Coneflowers: we have both ruby star and green twister varieties and this is the first year all of our plants have multiple blooms

• Verbena bonariensis- this is an ALL-pollinator superstar and it’s fun to watch visitors fly to this tall potted plant through my office window. I Recently saw a great-spangled fritillary on this plant…the first of the season in our garden.

• bee balm- this red variety is currently the favorite hummingbird plant in our garden and two hummers were dueling over our patch this week.

Perhaps the star of the week though, is our aggressively spreading common milkweed. It’s popping up through deck cracks and has completely engulfed one side of our deck…that’s fine though because that area is mainly rocks.

We have not planted ONE common milkweed here, but it has easily become the largest patch in our yarden. Check out my video tour of the patch, but first, your weekly update on Raise The Migration 2025…

🥚 How to FIND Monarch Eggs❓🌿 👀

A lot of people don’t bother trying to find impossibly tiny monarch eggs, focusing on the much easier to see monarch caterpillars.

Unfortunately, that strategy often leads to heartache with monarch disease and parasites, like those terrible tachinid flies.

When you start with eggs, you’ll rarely experience these issues and have a much better chance of raising healthy monarch butterflies.

Click the link below for some tips on how are where to find monarchs starting in your own back yard:

10 Places to FIND Monarch Eggs❓ ⬅️

…and speaking of places to look for milkweed, I have seen several females fluttering around this patch in the past week, which was 100% planned (and planted) by Ms. Mother Nature herself…

🎥 Garden Tour: UNPLANNED Milkweed Patch

Garden Resources

Below are a couple of the standout plants mentioned above to consider now, or for future gardens:

Purple Coneflowers ⬅️ (summer blooming perennial for bees and butterflies)

Common Milkweed ⬅️ (preferred native milkweed by monarchs + how to make it BEHAVE in the garden)

Coming Up Next?

With planting season over until fall, we’ll continue to report on plant growth, and expected and unexpected garden visitors…

Until next time,

Tony your Butterfly Guide