Do you have the yellow and orange flowering milkweed in your garden? The kind that flowers all winter? You may be killing Monarchs with it.  Replace it with the native milkweed as soon as you can.

The winter blooms of the tropical milkweed entice Monarch butterflies to linger in the area rather than migrate, and they will die in our chill winters. Cutting down your tropical milkweeds in the fall and winter will help, but replacing them with the native milkweed is better. Native perennial milkweeds go dormant in the winter and will save you the trouble.

Also, milkweed can harbor a protozoan parasite called Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE). Monarch caterpillars ingest the parasite along with their milkweed meals, and when they hatch from their chrysalises they are covered in spores which debilitate the butterfly. Only if Monarchs migrate and milkweed plants go dormant can the spore cycle be broken.

Our native milkweeds have beautiful flowerheads and need little supplemental water. Narrowleaf milkweed has the slender leaves of its name, while Showy milkweed looks entirely different with its broad grayish green leaves and upright growth. An unusual plant, Desert milkweed blooms all summer but then loses its leaves early. The tall stalks give a nice vertical look to a desert-themed garden. All produce pods filled with fluff that will spread the attached seeds with a gust of wind.

If you see aphids on milkweed plants, know that that is a great sign that the plant hasn’t been treated with systemic insecticide.  Unlike Moosa Creek, some nurseries do treat their milkweed with insecticide which then will kill the Monarch caterpillars that feed on them.

Native milkweed can be incorporated into low-water-use flower beds where their dormancy and leaf loss as they are eaten by Monarch caterpillars won’t be too obvious. The caterpillars will eat their fill and then move away from the host plant to form their amazing gold-spotted green cocoons on neighboring plants, even up trees, so planting milkweeds in a community is important. They often grow with California fuchsia, California buckwheat, and monkeyflower.

Native milkweeds are the right choice for Monarch survival, and a great accent to your garden.