@anipgarden / anipgarden.tumblr.com
I have seen a lot of gardening advice in my time, but your blog has to have some of the most clear, actionable, and downright helpful collection of information on different ways to garden. Keep it up. I admire you.
I'm so glad its helpful!! I definitely try my best to make sure things are well-sourced and researched before I write about them.
I should probably share stuff about my own personal garden more, but it feels like so much is going on right now but also so little. Either way, I hope you continue to enjoy the blog!!
(OK but please also consider I'm not an ~expert~ I'm not a ~scholar~ I'm just a nerd on Tumblr who really likes milkweed and wanted to make a fun lil post about it)
[Image ID: a green, leafy common milkweed plant (Asclepias syriaca) with five large, ovalish and bumpy green seed pods. The seed pods are currently unopened.]
It’s fall, which means if you haven’t seen them already, now’s the time that milkweed plants will start producing seed pods! (Well, technically, they’re called follicles, but fuck it they’re seed pods). Each pod has dozens of seeds inside, some species can even have up to 200 seeds, so even collecting just a few can be a good way to boost your pollinator gardening efforts big time! What you do with them then is up to you--adding life to your backyard garden, sharing with friends, making seed bombs--but first you’ve gotta collect them.
Some of you may have heard about Monarch butterflies being added to the Threatened species list in the US and be planning to immediately rush out in spring and buy all the milkweed you can manage to do your part and help the species.
And that's fantastic!! Starting a pollinator garden and/or encouraging people and businesses around you to do the same is an excellent way to help not just Monarchs but many other threatened and at-risk pollinator species!
However.
Please please PLEASE do not obtain Tropical Milkweed for this purpose!
Tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica)--also commonly known as bloodflower, Mexican butterflyweed, and scarlet milkweed--will likely be the first species of milkweed you find for sale at most nurseries. It'll be fairly cheap, too, and it grows and propagates so easily you'll just want to grab it! But do not do that!
Tropical milkweed can cause a host of issues that can ultimately harm the butterflies you're trying to help, such as--
However--do not be discouraged!! There are over 100 species of milkweed native to the United States, and plenty of resources on which are native to your state specifically! From there, you can find the nurseries dedicated to selling native milkweeds, or buy/trade for/collect seeds to grow them yourself!!
The world of native milkweeds is vast and enchanting, and I'm sure you'll soon find a favorite species native to your area that suits your growing space! There's tons of amazing options--whether you choose the beautiful pink vanilla-smelling swamp milkweed, the sophisticated redring milkweed, the elusive purple milkweed, the alluring green antelopehorn milkweed, or the charming heartleaf milkweed, or even something I didn't list!
And there's tons of resources and lots of people willing to help you on your native milkweed journey! Like me! Feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any questions!
Just. PLEASE. Leave the tropical milkweed alone. Stay away.
TLDR: Start a pollinator garden to help the monarchs! Just don't plant tropical milkweed. There's hundreds of other milkweeds to grow instead!
Spring is on its way, so it's time to bring this up again before we all go out buying plants.
This is tropical milkweed! It's beautiful, but not native to the US, and causes spread of disease and failure to migrate in monarch butterflies.
HOWEVER. Note that if you live in central to southern Mexico, Central America, or South America, this plant is native and okay to plant! I've seen native monarchs and close relatives using these plants in Mexico and Bolivia (where I took this photo).
Look up the native milkweeds in your area to find which are best to plant! OP mentions a few resources and species. Some popular species out east in the US include swamp or rose milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), and whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata), as well as the most famous, though maybe not the prettiest, common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). Showy milkweed, Asclepias speciosa, is native to much of the west. If you're in the southewest, Asclepias subulata, the desert milkweed, is probably a better option.
Hello, your blog is really cool to me =)
I am a west coast asclepias nerd. It’s cool to see someone else who cares about milkweeds so much! My pfp is my little A. californica, whom I’ve named “Gumdrops”. It’s so interesting how milkweed species vary across the USA! I bet you have some where you are that I don’t know about, based off your A. syriaca and A. incarnata posting =)
Here’s a photo of some of my baby milkweeds! I have seeds for new species I haven’t grown before coming in the mail and I’m super excited!
Hey!!
Another milkweed fan!!! We shall grow in strength and conquer the lands!! LOL
I'd never seen A. californica before, it looks so cool! Kinda feels like a mix between Showy, Purple, Clasping, and Poke for me! Do you have any of the Heartleaf milkweed growing near you? That's my favorite kind that isn't native here!
There are so so many cool species of milkweed in the US and I haven't even looked at half of them (hell, I haven't even memorized all the ones in my state!) Have you heard of A. humistrata? Or A. feayi?
I need to start my milkweeds soon!! This is making me want to buy more swamp seeds lol!!
I loved this ask so so much!! Thanks for sending it in!!
We love our kitty cats. 🐱
We love our wildlife. 🐦
...But we need to talk about something extremely important to them both.
Much ink has been spilled regarding the ethics of letting your domestic cats outdoors or keeping them enclosed, and how healthy/unhealthy it is to let them roam.
However, we're going to focus on the perspective of what we see at our wildlife center, and the hundreds of cat-caught patients we see each year. The pictures in this post are some of our patients from this year.
"My cat never brought anything home before!"
"I always tell my cat not to hunt, but he doesn't listen!"
"My cat is a free spirit, she always meows at the door if I try to bring her inside!"
These are things we hear from outdoor cat owners who are often heartbroken to find a maimed, bleeding baby bunny or baby bird at their doorstep in the spring after they let their domestic cat roam. We gently educate this rescuer about how important it is to keep our pets contained, and then take the poor patient back for medical care.
Less than 1 in 5 patients survive the ordeal, even when we provide medical care and antibiotics to combat cats' deadly saliva. 😥 We have watched far too many wild animals take their final breaths in our hands, knowing that this could have been prevented.
If we consider ourselves "animal lovers," then we can't hold our pet cat's mental stimulation above wildlife's right to survive as nature intended. If we want to be good stewards of our planet, we owe it to our wild neighbors to not introduce invasive predators into their environment. This means trapping and adopting out stray cats (NOT re-abandoning them to the wild), keeping our cats indoors, in catios, or on leashes.
Since our pet cats are not native (like pet dogs, domesticated animals are by definition no longer wild!), the problem of feral and stray cats are a man-made issue. We owe it to our planet, our furry feline friends, and our wild neighbors to work together to protect them both! 🐦❤🐱
Update: The adult Robin in the second-to-last image did not survive their wounds. They passed, as well, a few days before this post went out. 🙁
saw your post about the tropical milkweed, and wanted to add that butterfly bush is invasive and bad for our butterflies, despite it's name! it is not a host plant for any of our native species, and attracting them to it does not allow for reproduction. also, it can redirect pollinators from our native plant species, causing ecosystem problems as a whole. i thought this might be useful information for people to know, since the name trips people up and it's still being commonly planted!
Ah yes, this as well!
I do find Butterfly Bush itself a bit frustrating--I know its invasive, but half the time when I'm trying to find an easy-to-reference list of suggested pollinator garden plants, Butterfly Bush is on the list. There's infertile varieties that can't reproduce--but they aren't always labeled as such, and even if you do have a variety that reproduces it's not always in your yard so you're not the one being affected by its spread per-say but it's still affecting the larger local ecosystem.
Though honestly half that problem is with big box stores/nurseries in general. Because sometimes people who want to start a pollinator garden aren't gonna google 'hey what should I put in a pollinator garden?' they just go to their nearest nursery and pick what looks pretty. Or they'll go to said nursery and ask someone working at that nursery what they should plant. And if the person working at that nursery knows a lot about pollinator gardening, that's grand! That's great! But also in either of these situations, if someone goes to a nursery like 'ooh I wanna plant things for butterflies! Oh! Butterfly bush! That's gotta be good for butterflies, right? Let's buy two!' what's gonna stop them? It's not like the nursery employees are gonna go 'uhm madam don't buy this plant that we sell and give us money actually'
And like people'll make the argument that 'oh people should do more research into native plants before they do things!!' or 'oh people should only shop at native plant nurseries how dare they buy from Lowes or Home Depot or Walmart or someplace!' but I cannot emphasize enough how much a lot of people A: don't even know or have heard of the concept of native vs invasive plants let alone would think to google that or B: are just busy and impulsive, and then also C: are not lucky enough to have the greatest native nurseries in the state down the street
Like invisible hand of the market convincing stores to stop selling invasive plants is not how things work that's never how things have worked that's like expecting the invisible hand of the market to convince manufacturers to use less plastic or treat chickens better.
I have gotten off topic. Butterfly bush also bad yes. Maybe I'll make a post that's like 'ooooh here are a big list of plants to avoid putting in your pollinator garden' or something but the funky thing about that is it'd also vary depending on where you are? Like I only know about the states and even then you've got some plants that are native in some parts of the states that you really shouldn't fucking plant like 2 or 3 states over, yknow?
Uhhhhhhhhhh im shutting up now
I’m trying to plan out a garden using native Arizona plants, and I was wondering if you could hook me up with someone who knows how I can get my hands on hillside vervain (verbena neomexicana). All my search results have given me results for more cultivated vervain varieties.
I am going to be so real with you
I have no idea
I also tried looking it up and only found the larger cultivars! And since I'm on the East coast, I'm only really familiar with seed companies that cover my area--I don't really know of any for the Arizona area, let alone if they'd have hillside vervain!
Hopefully someone seeing this will know of something! Otherwise all I can recommend is trying to contact the Arizona Native Plant Society? Maybe one of their partnered landscaping companies have some available for purchase, or will later in the year?
Fingers crossed for you!!
