How to Attract Butterflies to Your Garden

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Have you ever wondered why butterflies flutter around in your neighbor’s garden but just pass over yours? Do you want to have their beauty become part of your garden? Here are a few ways that you can attract butterflies and keep them there.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

Flowers
Leafy plants

Step1

Understand butterflies live only in hot, sunny areas so you’ll need to plant your butterfly garden where there is a lot of open sunshine.

Step2

Keep in mind that butterflies like to live in a garden that is quiet and peaceful and does not have a lot of noise or people in it. So, they will likely avoid the area around the kid’s outdoor activity set. But they might settle in the quieter areas of your sunny garden.

Step3

Remember butterflies eat pollen and will flutter from flower to flower looking for it. To attract them, you’ll need to plant flowers and flowering bushes so they have lots of food to eat. Your garden will not only be filled with colored flowers, but will attract many beautiful species of butterflies.

Step4

Know butterflies lay their eggs in the spring on dense leafy plants so when the eggs hatch, the caterpillar will remain on that plant and eat the leaves around it. These plants can be shrubs or bushes, trees or veggies with lots of green leaves.

Step5

Be aware that if you use insecticides on your veggie garden, you will kill any eggs that the butterflies lay so that could eliminate the butterflies from your garden. So, you might want to either avoid the insecticide or make available other leafy plants near the flowering plants so they’ll go directly to them to lay their eggs.

Tips & Warnings

If you go online to the Zoom Butterflies site, you can learn what flowers attract the different species of butterflies.
If you don’t want some plants with their green leaves being eaten down to the core, then you might want to establish the flowering bushes and flowers away from them, and then put lots of leafy plants around the flowers so that the butterflies will not lay their eggs of your choice plants.