
You can find several varieties sold at garden centers. Their flowers produce a strong and beautiful fragrance in the spring and fluffy seed pods in the fall that the goldfinches love to uses as nesting material.
Common Milkweed is a perennial native to Michigan and much of the eastern half of the U.S. and Canada. It prefers well-drained soils and full sunlight and is very easy to identify with its big broad meaty leaves and tall stem and tight starry flower clusters that look like exploding pink fireworks. It also bleeds a milky white sap wherever broken much like dandelions.


Female monarchs may lay only one egg per plant, which hatches into a caterpillar in about five days. Tiny little larva or caterpillars emerge and begin eating milkweed. Once fully grown the caterpillar forms a chrysalis and emerges as butterfly two weeks later.
Spring is a critical time for monarchs. Their numbers are at their lowest point at this time of year. The old generation is dying. A new generation must grow and survive. You can track their migration on the Monarch Butterfly Migration Map.
Resources:
Related Articles:
- Do Monarch Butterflies just wake up in the spring? http://goo.gl/5tkUk
- Monarch migration route http://goo.gl/L66ty
- Punctuation Butterflies: The First Butterfly of Spring! http://bit.ly/JHUpG1
- How Fast Does a Monarch Butterfly Fly? http://bit.ly/ywhpZr
- Did you know butterflies have ears on their wings? http://bit.ly/x04qEi
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