How To Build A Butterfly Garden In Florida

Egg caterpillar larva pupa aka chrysalis and adult.

How to build a butterfly garden in florida - You can create a dedicated butterfly garden or just tuck a few plants that attract butterflies into your landscaping. Butterflies love to soak up the sun while resting on a nice warm rock especially early in the morning. A garden with butterflies as much as one with lizards toads earthworms and other such creatures is a healthy balanced and productive garden. Most of the butterfly gardens are also attraction for beneficial insects and hummingbirds.

The showy zebra butterfly a florida and texas resident feeds its babies exclusively on the foliage of the passionflower. By including these rocks in your garden the butterflies will have a chance to get warmed up before they start feeding for the day. A well planned butterfly garden becomes a small but representative sample of the surrounding habitat and as such provides a safe haven for butterflies and other wildlife to gather seek shelter acquire food and water reproduce and build populations. If you reside in the eastern half of the united states you may attract the iridescent eastern tailed blue to your garden with a host planting of sweet peas.

In addition to their beauty the insects of the order lepidoptera butterflies moths and skippers provide us the service of pollinating the flowers we grow in our gardens to provide us with the. Do not underestimate the importance of even a small garden. So read my tips on how to build a butterfly garden. Productive butterfly gardens do not require a large land area because a great impact can be brought by even a.

A butterfly goes through 4 life stages. Adult butterflies live for about 2 weeks. Sally scalera is an urban horticulture agent and master gardener coordinator for the university of florida s institute of food and agriculture sciences. Having an active and healthy butterfly population can make the difference between a successful garden and a not so successful garden.

This post may contain affiliate links to amazon and or etsy which means that i may earn a small commission from some of the links in this post. Choose appropriate plants for each location understand each plan s basic water light and soil requirements. Include 1 or 2 large flat rocks in your butterfly garden. Give new plants a good start water and mulch new plantings to insure firm establishment.