Mid-Atlantic Gardening: Plant It and They Will Come 4 Monarch Pollinator Life Cycles, 1 by coleup

coleup wrote:
Happy Trop MW is easy to grow from cuttings in water or potting soil...almost as easy as Coleus! And, yes, it can be over wintered as a 'house plant'. potted and stashed in an unheated garage where it will go semi dormant like other tropicals (colocasia, banana, Mona Lavender or Dragon Wing Begonia) It also occasionally survives in the ground in Zone 7 with some mulch/dried leaves for root protection. Wants good drainage and not to totally dry out.

I agree with your reluctance to plant milkweed and other 'pollinator magnets' only to draw them in to an increased risk of demise by lethal mists. A newly hatched Monarch cat is very much smaller that mosquito wrigglers and it takes 10 - 14 days to become a chrysallis and another two weeks of exposure to fly free. And hungry birds, toads, etc that eat tainted cats bio accumulate the residual toxins up the food chain or downstream as it were.

Greenthumb cautions against Common Milkweed as 'aggressive' and therefore does not grow it in his garden, yet Sallyg has had Common Milkweed in her yard for 20+ years and doesn't comment on its aggressiveness, but rather lives with this 'not the most attractive plant in the border' letting it grow tall along with lilies and obedient plant sedums and others. I have never seen a patch of milkweed that didn't have any number of other plants growing hapilly along with.

It is the nature of Milkweed to begin with a seed, growing into a mother plant that colonizes an area thru underground rhizomes. The mature plants flower and provide nectar to many pollinators and long about now, send up tender new daughter plants for Monarchs to lay their migrating generation on instead of the tough scruffy looking mature leaves. And then the seed pods ripen and are dispersed (Seeds need to be pollinated by a different 'colony' which the Monarchs and others do very well) The larger the patch, the easier for the Monarch to find.

- Nature Institute
http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/ch/Milkweed.

Milkweed and Oak are two of the top plants that support far more species than any other! Milkweed is named Asclepias, after the god of medicine and healing. That's a pretty hefty reccomendation for a plant species! Perhaps too many of us in North America bought in to the organized campaign funded and cooked up by Dupont to turn up our noses at this weed which was in direct competition with Dupont's 'kapon' and latex industries (just like was done with that most useful homestead plant, hemp, source of food fiber and oil and easy to grow)

Found this pic the other day of women gathering milkweed fluff for the war effort...circa 1943.

Oh, there are more than 100 varieties of milkweed, each with their own growth habits. It is estimated that 6000 acres of 'Monarch habitat' is lost every day.

Plant it and they will come. Raise the Migration Take a Monarch to lunch: Plant Milkweed