About The Monarch Cafe

The Monarch Cafe is an area in my yard with 4 Milkmaid Milkweed plants, 4 Hello Yellow Milkweed Plants, 4 Cinderella Milkweed Plants, 4 Common Milkweed plants a dozen or so Orange flowered Milkweed plants a few milkweed vines and 1 swamp milkweed.

The Cafe was designed to attract the #MonarchButterfly in all its stages.

Last year with just the orange flowered milkweed, we released 38 #Monarch butterflies.  This year we added the expansion with 17 new milkweed plants.

This year we have found most of our eggs and caterpillars on the Milkmaid milkweed plants, but several of the other varieties have also had eggs on them.  So far this year we have released 13 #Monarch butterflies.

I have been posting pictures on Facebook and Flickr the last couple years and noticed this year the growing popularity of people looking at my pictures and thinking "I could do that".  That is the sentiment I want to inspire.

Last winter a storm in Mexico killed half the #MonarchButterfly population which was already dramatically down from when I "raised" #Monarchs as a kid.  Now there are groups like "Missouri for Monarch" on a campaign to keep the #MonarchButterfly from becoming extinct.

 The sign (in the picture) was a gift from a friend who came up with the name "Monarch Cafe" for the garden, not that the #MonarchButterfly needed the sign to find the garden.

In the posts to come, I will be detailing the #Monarch activity "at the Monarch Cafe".