Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: A portable garden cage idea for raising cats!, 3 by beckygardener

beckygardener wrote:
These are some photos of the portable self-watering garden that we made. We planted Milkweed, Parsley, and Passiflora vine as host plants. And added some nectar plants as well, though the host plants literally took over the portable garden. When I brought it to my home, I saw all the caterpillars and covered it with fabric netting. I later replaced the netting (because it kept tearing) with some sheer fabric that acts also as a little shade to the plants and caterpillars. Inside the cage I've been raising Black Swallowtails, Gulf Fritillaries, Zebra Longwings, and Monarch caterpillars. I had so many BSTs that they literally ate the two huge parsley plants to the nubs. If it doesn't grow back, I will replace with new plants. The cats ate much of the passiflora vine, too. But it will hopefully recover as the summer progresses so that I can raise more caterpillars. The Monarchs have not been as abundant lately, so only a few of those cats for raising. And I've got quite a few ZLW caterpillars that are getting ready to turn into chrysalises.

This project has turned out to be far more successful than I ever dreamed and it provides a self-watering container garden that doubles as a cage to raise butterflies in! I don't have to keep taking cuttings of plants to feed to my caterpillars in the smaller cages when they are raised in this type of cage!

This message was edited Jun 25, 2012 6:36 PM