How will a monarch find one isolated plant? Monarchs usually lay just one egg on a leaf, but they lay eggs on lots of leaves of more than one plant. They grow quickly enough that these large plants aren’t necessary and having one plant isn’t going to really help much.Ĭommon milkweed growing in a field ©Janet Allen
#Common milkweed seedling free#
HGCNY’s free Native Plant Shopping Guide shows which nurseries in CNY have native milkweeds for sale.Īn aside: We wish more nurseries would offer six-packs of small milkweed plants rather than large, pricey single plants. They also grow them for our HGCNY Wild Ones spring and fall native plant sales. Here in Central NY we’re fortunate that some of our local native plant nurseries are providing local ecotype milkweeds. If we were to buy any new milkweeds, we would look for plants grown from seeds responsibly collected in our own region. Local ecotype: Now that there is an organized campaign to restore milkweed, local ecotypes of milkweed species are becoming available. Knowing the botanic name is very useful and helps us find the real milkweeds (if the grower actually uses these more correct names).Īnd for milkweeds and plants in general, we favor the species, not cultivars or hybrids.
Some nurseries name them something innocuous like “pink butterfly plant,” but that doesn’t help people who are looking for milkweeds. Sometimes nurseries are afraid to call them milkweeds since people shy away from anything with “weed” in its name, and because milkweeds have an undeservedly bad reputation. When we look for milkweed seeds or plants to purchase, we always look for this name. Purchasing milkweedsĪll milkweeds are of the genus Asclepias.
We’ve tried to maximize our milkweeds in a number of ways - especially since it’s sometimes difficult to find them for sale or at least to find them for sale at an affordable enough price to buy more than just a few. We want lots of monarchs, so we plant lots of milkweed for them to lay their eggs on. This is a disaster for monarchs since monarch caterpillars can eat nothing but milkweed.
Because of modern changes, such as suburbanization and Roundup-Ready crops, there’s a lot less milkweed than there was in the past. One of the keys to having monarchs - for their survival now and in the future - is having lots of milkweed.
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