Northern Milkweed. By planting milkweed in your own garden landscape and throughout your community you can help reverse the fortune of these beautiful insects. Tropical milkweed can also interfere with monarch migration and reproduction.
By planting milkweed in your own garden landscape and throughout your community you can help reverse the fortune of these beautiful insects. Milkweed plants benefit from vernalization a process of cold treatment before sprouting. Asclepias is a genus of herbaceous perennial flowering plants known as milkweeds named for their latex a milky substance containing cardiac glycosides termed cardenolides exuded where cells are damaged.
Milkweed often does not begin growing in northern gardens in time to be fully beneficial to butterflies.
When grown in northern areas where it can grow later in the year than native species the presence of tropical milkweed may confuse monarchs into breeding at a time when they should be migrating. There you can start seeds of milkweed inside so they will be ready to plant when the soil has warmed. Common milkweed asclepias syriaca is a native herbaceous perennial whose main virtue is its appeal to butterflies especially the monarch which deposits its eggs on the milkweed when the caterpillars hatch they feed on the leaves of milkweed. When grown in northern areas where it can grow later in the year than native species the presence of tropical milkweed may confuse monarchs into breeding at a time when they should be migrating.