We are growing some butterflies again. I say this because we did this two years ago, much to the dismay of our wallet, and we had some leftover milkweed sitting around growing all wild and crazy in the back yard. We decided to watch caterpillars turn into butterflies because my mother-in-law bought us a little tent for raising butterflies for Christmas or a birthday or a random Goodwill run and it said that it came with free caterpillar eggs. That was a lie. The eggs were free, with like $10 shipping. I'm kinda cheap, and since we live in Florida and there are monarch butterflies flying all over the place, we thought that we would just buy milkweed (around $7) and get a bunch of eggs for free.
This works beautifully of course because as soon as the milkweed was on the back porch, butterflies would come right up to it and put their little butterfly butts on the leaves and deposit a little cream colored egg on the bottom of the leaf. Soon, we had a few caterpillars. Then we had a lot of caterpillars. Then we had an enormous amount of caterpillars who ate
the one milkweed up in a day so that we had to keep buying more and more to feed these little monster bugs that keep growing and growing and leaving a massive amount of caterpillar poop all over the ground. We ended up spending about $70 on milkweed and had plants all over the place in various stages of growth and being eaten by caterpillars.
After two years off, most of the plants died due to our lackluster interest in investing time, energy, and money into increasing the local monarch butterfly population. Two plants survived and when the first little egg was spotted on one of the leaves, we decided to jump into the learning experience with the kids again. Weston does not remember the butterflies since he was too young, and Juliana was still in the newborn blob stage where she just laid around on the floor looking at things so we are going to invest in watching caterpillars grow into butterflies again this year.
We got a cage from my mother-in-law two years ago to put the milkweed in so the lizards didn't eat the caterpillars and the cage has been sitting in the garage for two years waiting to be brought back over to my mother-in-laws house and it never made it there. So I got the cage out of the garage and put the milkweed in the it so we can watch the caterpillars devour the milkweed and turn into cocoons on the top of the cage. So far, the caterpillars have eaten one whole plant and we have invested more money into a little milkweed garden in the backyard. Let's hope that we get some education out of our foliage investment this year.
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