Video: How to Start a Butterfly Garden

How to Start a Butterfly Garden

Starting a butterfly garden will soon have your winged friends flying all over your backyard. Start a butterfly garden with help from an experienced gardener in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hi, this is Nell Foster for eHow.com, and today I'm going to tell you how to start a butterfly garden. Don't we all love butterflies in the garden? I have a lot in my garden. I have mainly monarchs here. There a lot of them in Santa Barbara. And I just love to see them flying all over the backyard and the front yard just beautiful. So what you should do first is do a little research to find out what butterflies are in your area. And that's going to determine what are their host plants. There are host plants which means the ones that they lay their eggs on. And then there are plants they are attracted to and they will feed off of. So things that butterflies like is they like sun. They really like sun. And they like a protected area. They don't like a lot of wind. So if you are in a really windy area you might not get a lot of butterflies, probably not. And they also like a water source. For some reason they love a mud puddle. I think there's some nutrients in the dirt that they really like. They like that kind of a mucky muddy kind of a water source for them. But I was talking about the monarchs. And monarchs for monarchs the host plant for instance is anything in the milkweed family. So if you have Aesculapius which is butterfly weed that is a monarch host plant. And another type of butterfly that I have flying around a lot is the Fritillary. And that's because my neighbor's have a passion vine. And passion vine is a host plant for the Fritillary. And I'm going to show you this up close. This is what butterflies like. They like a flower that has a flat center because they land on it They don't have a long beak like a hummingbird has a beak to get into a tubular flower. They can get right in here and get all the good stuff out of the plant just by landing right on top of it. Or you can put out some oranges or some watermelon in your garden. Some pieces of fruit because they like rotting fruit too, they love the sugar. You can actually do a butterfly feeder which would have like a sugar solution in it. And there's butterfly houses. Did you know that? Google butterfly houses they are really cool looking. And what that is it's a shelter for the butterfly. If it's cold they can get in there. If there's predators in the area it can go in there. It can go in there to stay warm so they are really fun to have in the garden too, the butterfly houses. And I'm standing underneath my bougainvillea because the butterflies love this. They love to feed on this. And as you can see it's a very bright magenta color because butterflies love bright colors like pink, red, yellow, orange. They are attracted to the nasturtiums. This is Nell Foster for eHow.com and I have just given you some ideas on how to start a butterfly garden.

How to Start a Butterfly Garden

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