How to Attract Butterflies to Your Garden
Butterflies are a great addition to your garden, and they are a great help with pollination. To make your garden more butterfly-friendly, you’ve got to have essentials to make them feel comfortable and make your garden their home. Here’s how.
A Butterfly’s Life Cycle
Before plotting out how to make your garden more attractive to butterflies, you must first understand the life cycle of a butterfly. A butterfly lays eggs on a leaf, which will serve as food once the eggs have hatched. The caterpillars will then eventually mature, form a cocoon and break out a beautiful butterfly. The adult butterfly will then feed on nectar for the rest of its life.
Your garden should be able to support all stages of a butterfly’s metamorphic cycle to enable them to live and multiply in your garden.
Garden Environment
While plants are crucial for supporting the life cycle of butterflies, having the right environment is also important to make them happy. Here are some environmental factors you should consider when making your garden butterfly-friendly:
Climate and Temperature
butterflyButterflies make their appearance in spring up to the fall season. Temperature-wise, they prefer making their grand entrance once the temperature reaches around 60 degrees Fahrenheit. They like their temperatures around 85 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and they like a lot of sun.
Make sure that your garden has a lot of sunny areas or is generally a place where sun will permeate strongly. Provide a rock that can absorb heat. Butterflies tend to go to rocks when the day is particularly cool. Similarly, your garden should also have shady areas where yo
Wet Sand or Mud Puddles
As much as butterflies love their bit of sun, they also love their shallow puddles. Why? It’s been theorized that butterflies get their supplemental nutrition from the minerals in these puddles. You can simply put a shallow dish in a shady spot in your garden for this purpose. A bird bath will do just as well.
Wind Buffer
Butterflies have very delicate wings and cannot withstand high winds. Having a few trees around that will serve as wind buffers are a great way to protect the butterflies from being blown away.
Hibernating Box
Hibernating boxes are simply boxes where butterflies can hibernate in before winter approaches. They can be any shape or size, as long as they are situated next to nectar-producing flowers in the fall. However, you can opt to skip this step entirely because butterflies can be quite comfortable in natural hibernation spots, like logs or tall grasses.
Avoid Insecticides
For obvious reasons, butterflies will be more inclined to stay in an environment where they will be safe from insecticides.
Plants for Caterpillars
For adult butterflies to start laying eggs in your garden, you must provide them a variety of plants that will serve as food for the newly-hatched caterpillars. Variety in plants means that you will be able to attract a variety of butterflies as well. Caterpillars like to feed on the following plants:
Hollyhocks
Fennel
Carrot
Parsley
Buckthorns
Poplars
Sage
Dill
Remember, expect these plants to be chewed through for the butterfly hatchlings as soon as they get out of their shells!
Plants for Adult Butterflies
Once the caterpillars have turned into butterflies, they will feed on nectar. Make sure that you plant butterfly-friendly flowers that are available in the different seasons of the year. Having different bright colors and a variety of flowers in the same plot will also make the garden more attractive to butterflies. Here are some flowering plants that are very attractive to butterflies:
Asters
Butterfly plant
Lilac
Marigold
Sunflower
Rabbitbrush
Zinnias
Verbena