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Butterfly Milkweed

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I noticed that my hybrid Butterfly Milkweed – Asclepias tuberosa – had started to form buds. I had noticed the developing buds about a week and a half ago as I took a walk in my garden checking on all the plants as I went.

Luckily I had my camera at hand and I was able to take a few nice photos of the developing buds:

Milkweed tuberosa buds

Butterfly weed is a herbaceous perennial that grows up to two feet in height. It dies back each winter and then re-sprouts in late spring from underground tubers.

Milkweed is slow to come up each spring. If you grow any form of milkweed you should always take care to mark the spot that it grows in each fall or at the very least try to remember where it was as it’s slow to make an appearance and you wouldn’t want to dig in the area and damage the plants roots.

Flower clusters of brilliant orange or red appear in midsummer. Once the blooms are spent attractive green pods develop. When the pods mature they open to release silky parachutes that drift away on autumn winds. This is how the butterfly weed propagates as the seeds of the butterfly weed are on these silky floating strands.

Each cluster has many flowers, several of these flowers will have an inner whorl of petals that are called the corolla and an outer whorl of sepals that is called the calyx. Butterfly Milkweed is a little different from other species of milkweed in that the sap is not milky nor are the leaves opposite.

Butterfly weed is a naturally occurring plant that grows east of the Rockies in North America. It’s preference is for well drained sandy soils.

If you’d like to grow these lovely flowers plant them in full sun to very light shade. Butterfly weed is hardy to USDA zones 4 – 10.

If you’d like to encourage butterflies to visit your garden this flower is a must as the caterpillars of Monarch butterflies feed only on milkweed foliage. Adult butterflies of many species enjoy sipping the nectar from the butterfly weeds blossoms.

I grow a few types of milkweed in my garden and every time I gaze out my kitchen window I see butterflies visiting many of my plants.






Need some painting done? Try College Pro Painters

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As many of you know we’ve been slowly renovating our home on our own. It’s been an ongoing process. We got our house 6 years ago this month and we still aren’t finished!

When we first got our home we tore down a few walls and of course repaired the damage. Then we proceeded to paint the whole house on our own. We had to do this because the entire house was painted robins egg blue! It’s not a terrible color, but I certainly didn’t want my whole house that color!

Now, if we’d been smart we could have saved ourselves quite a bit of time and hired a company such as College Pro Painters to do all of our house painting. I don’t dislike house painting, but considering all the home improvement tasks I’ve done in the last 6 years I’d have to say that house painting is my least favorite.

What I like about College Pro Painters is that it’s run and operated by college students. College students working for College Pro Painters paint approximately 30,000 homes in communities throughout North America. They operate in 7 Canadian Provinces and 29 U.S. States.

By using the services of College Pro Painters you will not only not have to do a task that you might not enjoy or have time for yourself, but you’ll also be providing work for college students.

As I said earlier the company is owned and run by college students throughout North America. All of the managers are full time college students. Each year they recruit, select and train hundreds of franchise managers to deliver a quality paint job.

Now that I know about College Pro Painters I think I’ll bookmark the site so that I can contact them the next time I have some rooms to paint. I’d love to give that duty to someone else and if I can help college students earn money for their tuition by doing so all the better.

If you need some painting done visit the site and book their services. Oh and don’t forget to take a look at their job gallery so that you can see some of College Pro Painters past work.

Mosquito repellers

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Well it’s just about mosquito season here. I imagine some of you already have mosquito’s in your gardens.

I hate them! I always swell up quite a bit where they bite me. If it’s not an allergic reaction is definitely an enhanced reaction to their bites … so you can see why I don’t like being bit by them.

Now with West Nile spreading throughout North America I’ve got even more reason to not want to be bit by these pesky blood sucking critters.

Do you do anything to prevent mosquitoes from biting you, or to deter them from your yard?

Naturally rules such as not leaving standing water in a bucket or container apply here … but what else do you do to keep from getting bitten?

I’m not big on chemicals. Not on me or in my yard. We do however use citronella candles, and citronella oil in our tiki torches. That helps to some degree, but it doesn’t totally keep them at bay.

What do you do?

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