The Monarchs are back!

Yes, the Monarchs are back.  Actually, we've seen a Monarch butterfly flying around here and there already, but today I saw one on the blooming milkweeds, so I'm counting that as the start of the season!

And if you look real close to the right of the butterfly, you can see the other reason I'm counting this as the start of the Monarch season...see the caterpillar on the chewing on the leaf?

Here it is a little closer...

And closer still but the butterfly flew away.  Now we'll watch for the appearance of the chrysalis.   I'll have to look up the Monarch Watch website so we can do our reporting.

Today was Saturday Market day again, and today we brought some actual produce--onions--white & red, lettuce, and herbs--summer savory, basil, two kinds of thyme, and oregano.  And we still had some of our "fleas" from the flea market last week.  And best of all, we got rid of several of those "fleas" that have been taking up space in our lives.  Yes!  One of the vendors had beets and carrots already.  He must have started them in heated garden beds!  And now they say it's going to get unseasonably cold again, just when we were starting to make some forward garden progress!  

Summer WILL come and so will the monarchs!

The more people you meet, the more things you learn!

A few weeks ago we had someone here who works at the University of Minnesota in the conservation area.  Somehow the conversation went to gardens and the topic of monarch butterflies came up.  We have always been tuned in to monarchs in all their stages.  Leann used to bring the chrysalis(es)?? to school in the fall so students could watch the monarchs hatch.  We loved the lilac and phlox seasons at our Minneapolis house because they would be full of monarchs, and last summer we even grew some milkweed plants to attract monarchs and other butterflies. The clumps of flowers on milkweeds smell SO sweet!  And, no, those aren't monarchs shown there but some variety of fritillary.

And I love milkweed pods in the fall.  We have a low, swampy area up in our back fields and it's full of milkweed plants in the fall.

So, hearing all this, he thought we'd be good candidates to get enrolled in the Monarch Watch program.  

So, I've ordered the seed kit which contains packets of these seeds that attract monarchs.  I didn't know there were THREE kinds of milkweeds!

Then we get our Monarch Waystation certified and wait for the snow and cold to go away and the fun to begin!

And they send us this cool metal sign to put up near our site.