🌻 Mexican Sunflower ROW 🌻

Happy Sunday Good GROWer,

summer has returned to the bold north with 80’s, heat, and humidity. 🌞

This is perfect weather for migration-generation monarchs looking to fuel up before making the long migration south 🦋 🇲🇽…but has the migration already passed us by in ‘25? 🤔 

As I’ve mentioned before, we are shutting down our raising supplies shop. At this point, I’ve finished moving over necessary content from the shopify store to the wordpress blog. This means we now have a shop shut down date coming up next week…

September SHOP Farewell 👋

Our shop is permanently shutting down on Wednesday, September 17th, 2025.

As you might have noticed, most of the supplies are sold out but you can still buy these supplies while the shop is still up ands running. We pay shipping on all shop orders $50+

1. Little hole lids ⬅️ only buy these IF you already own our ‘fat cat’ floral tubes ⬅️, which are almost sold out. These alternative lids are for thin-stemmed cuttings to prevent baby caterpillar drownings

2. Garden for Life Pollinator Garden Flags ⬅️ (20% OFF and a good gift idea for the upcoming holidays!)

3. Raising Butterfly and Milkweed Quickstart Guides ⬅️ (instant PDF downloads: save an extra 15% when you bundle with lids or flag)

Thank you for all your support over the past decade. 😍 Don’t worry, I’m not giving up on supporting monarchs and other beneficial pollinators and will still publish a newsletter and the monarch butterfly garden blog to help you achieve these goals.

Raising Report 

We currently still have 9 caterpillars and 5 chrysalides, and one newly emerged female monarch this morning!

I brought in one instar 2 this week, but not sure how the count jumped from 13 to 15 total…for the first time in raise the migration history, I messed up the initial count or unknowingly brought in an extra cat❓ 🙃 I don’t normally count caterpillars brought in (during Raise The Migration) because they can be parasitized outdoors...since this last caterpillar was pretty small, hopefully it went undetected by tachinid flies.

The worrisome emails have already begun as we approach mid-September….is it too late for monarchs to migrate?

NOT Too Late to Migrate

Let me calm some frazzled nerves with these late-season facts:

1. In Minnesota, we’ve released monarchs through the first week of OCTOBER without issue

2. In Minnesota, I’ve seen monarchs still fluttering south (in Minnesota) during the last week of OCTOBER 🎃

3. There have been reports of monarchs entering the sanctuaries in Mexico as late as DECEMBER

4. Monarchs can fly hundreds of miles a day ⬅️ (if necessary)

5. Monarchs can fly in temps as low as 40’s, if there’s sun…I have witnessed this with my own eyes! 👀

So, at this point in time, there’s absolutely no reason to worry about whether monarchs can still migrate from your region. If it does get to cold, monarchs can serve the ecosystem in other ways as food for predators. If they all survived, you would not have a healthy ecosystem to support them.

If you’re raising migratory monarchs, make sure you give them the best chance to successfully join their monarch mates down south:

How to Safely Release Monarch Butterflies ⬅️

🌿 Garden PLANT Report 🌺

My plan was to show more late pollinators in video-form this week, but it’s still been relatively quiet here with a max of 5 monarchs in the garden at one time…this is the lowest number for ‘peak migration’ I can recall seeing in our garden, but I’ve heard a few reports that there are more monarchs north of us. Here’s our glorious stand of Mexican sunflowers, going largely unused this migration season:

My gut is telling me we’ve been bypassed because of the early cool spell this year, but I’m still holding out a little hope we could see a few more migrators this coming week…

I hope you are seeing more monarch activity in your region!

Besides Mexican sunflowers, purple giant hyssop, verbena bonariensis, and zinnias are still in prime condition to support late-season pollinators and new england asters are starting to unfold their late-season brilliance.

Past peak: goldenrod, liatris

Coming Up Next?

We will discuss fall planting to see which perennials you can add now, to start improving upon your 2025 garden. 🧑‍🌾🪴👩‍🌾

Until next time,

Tony your Butterfly Guide