Having a successful butterfly garden is easy and anyone can create an attractive butterfly garden. Just follow these 3 simple steps and you’ll have butterflies flocking to your garden!

Certain plants and certain conditions are needed to attract butterflies and keep them coming back to visit your garden every day:

Step 1: A Warm Spot - butterflies are cold blooded and need the sun to warm them. Scan your garden area for a place that gets at least 6 hours of sunlight per day and it protected from the wind. Add large flat rocks for the butterflies to sunbathe on.

Step 2: The Right Plants - butterflies and caterpillars that will turn into beautiful butterflies rely on nectar rich flowers (see below for a list of flowers). Choose flowers of varying growth heights and blooming times. To feed the caterpillar larvae, plant milkweed (to lure monarch caterpillars), parsley and fennel (for black swallowtails), and yarrow, hollyhock, and borage (for painted ladies).

Step 3: Include Mud and/or Wet Sand - create a muddy area or include a container of wet sand in the area and keep it moist. Butterflies get sodium and minerals from these damp areas.

IMPORTANT!: Never use insecticides anywhere in your butterfly garden. Even “organic” pesticides and weed killers can harm these delicate insects.

Here some perfect plant choices for attracting butterflies to your garden:

If you find that you can’t locate some of these varieties in your local garden centers, try on line resources. Many times the on line prices are better, the choice is wider, and most offer some type of free shipping:

Gurney’s Seed and Nursery

Henry Fields Seed and Nursery

Spring Hill Nursery

BloomingBulb.com

Many garden supply centers also sell Butterfly Garden Kits and Flower Mixes, like these:

Hummingbird and Butterfly Mix

Butterfly Bush Collection

Asclepias, ‘Gay Butterfly Mix’

Bird and Butterfly Mix Wildflower

Wildflower Seeds, Bird and Butterfly Mix

Butterfly Flower Mix

Garden, Butterfly Perennial

Don’t forget to let us know how your butterfly garden goes! You can contact us with questions or comments by using our handy Contact Form.

My garden so far is completely organic. Meaning, that I don’t use any chemicals of any kind. And that’s the way I’d like to keep it. But as the summer goes on, I’m finding more and more bugs and pests in and around my garden. Luckily for me, and those of you who also want to keep your gardens chemical free, there are a variety of plants and flowers that will do the same job as pesticides - only without harming our delicious fruits and vegetables.

Here is a list of 20 plants you need to have in your vegetable garden. These plants may surprise you! I had no idea that these plants not only looked beautiful and tasted wonderful, but also can help deter pests and bugs from the garden.

1. Basil - A favorite herb of mine anyway - and I already had some in my garden of course! Basil repels aphids, flies, mosquitos, and mites. It also has fungicidal properties. If you plant basil around your tomato plants, you won’t have to worry about icky hornworms.
2. Borage - This one I was really not familiar with, but found out that it is an herb sometimes called the starflower. The leaves taste like fresh cucumber and are used in salads and soups especially in Germany. The flowers are sweet like honey and are often used as edible decoration. It is also good for planting around your tomatos as it repels tomato worms.
3. Catnip - Cats love it, but ants, fleas and mosquitoes hate it! I see this herb in the supermarket and until now have just passed it by not knowing what to use it for. Next time I see it, I’m buying it!
4. Chamomile - Great for a relaxing pre-bedtime tea, the camomile plant keeps cabbage moths out of your garden.
5. Chives - A baked potato isn’t the same without them, but aphids don’t feel the same! Plant chives especially around your roses and lettuce.
6. Feverfew - A really pretty flower that almost looks like a daisy, and found in old gardens. It is often used as a medicinal herb. For my purposes, it is known to keep moths away. I’ll put some in pots by my front door and see if it truly works!
7. Lavender - Smells fantastic, great for making relaxation teas AND keeps slugs out of the garden. Excellent news as I am not a slug fan at all.
8. Marigolds - These are traditional flowers that my mom always planted among our vegetable plants in the gardens we had as kids. Bugs cannot stand the smell of marigolds, so plant them liberally around your garden. French and African varieties also keep nematodes out of the soil.
9. Mint - Another great herb that no kitchen garden should be without anyway. But did you know that mint plants repel aphids, cabbage moths, and cabbage worms? I sure didn’t!
10. Nasturtium - A plant I’ve read about in magazines but didn’t realize is quite prevalent. This pretty little flowering plants keeps away aphids and whiteflies. Be sure to plant these around fruit trees, cucumbers and squash.
11. Onion - If you love to cook, you love the onion. We have lots of wild onions in our neck of the woods. Onions keep ants at bay. Which is good because we also have lots of those!
12. Oregano - Growing up half Italian, I believe I have oregano streaming through my blood. Either way, its great in tomato sauce and italian dressing, and oregano plants keep away cucumber beetles.
13. Pennyroyal - In the mint family, pennyroyal leaves have a strong spearmint smell. Ants don’t like it, so I definitely do!
14. Petunia - I knew a little girl named Petunia once…but I digress. Pretty flowers and the added benefit of repelling aphids, leafhoppers, and Mexican bean beetles.
15. Radish - A great entry for salad ingredients, the radish is smartly planted around cucumbers and squash to keep away beetles.
16. Rosemary - I love rosemary bread and so always have fresh rosemary around. Plant this in your garden to ward off the cabbage moth, bean beetle and carrot fly.
17. Rue - As in “you’ll rue the day” I guess, because this medicinal herb smells terrible! But it does keep away Japanese beetles (and gardeners…yuck!). ***GOOD TO KNOW: don’t plant rue anywhere near your basil - they don’t play well, and so neither plant will grow.
18. Tansy - Another pretty little flower, Tansy is disagreeable to ants.
19. Thyme - One of the herbs we can’t do without, Thyme plants deter cabbage worms and slugs.
20. Tomato - Yep, you’ve probably got these in your garden already. And if you also have asparagus, plant them together. The tomato plants will ward off asparagus beetles.

If any of this information surprises you, you’re not alone. We’ve always had gardens and while we knew about some of these helpful plants, we were surprised by a great many too.

If you have any great garden tips, please send them to us using our handy contact form or by leaving a comment on this post. We’d love to hear from you!

Deep into our garden, way in the back sits a small green plant. Its an eggplant… and for the last month or so it has not done much of anything. Our cucumber vines were expanding, threatening to take over the eggplant and block the sunlight from it. We repositioned the surging vines, thus saving the tiny plant.

Under the shadows cast by our colossal cucumber vines, the formation of our eggplants started. Several new leaves were seen growing out, stretching, as if they were trying to reach the sun. The plant grew taller, rivaling the height of some of our pepper plants. After expanding upwards, the plant slowed down and decided to concentrate more of its energy on fruit production. A bud or two started to grow outwards, they opened, and then two tiny violet flowers appeared. Slowly, a little lump formed underneath one of them, a purple lump. It grew larger, growing bigger everyday. It was our first eggplant.

Today it has reached the size of a tennis ball, and there are several more on the way. The only question that remains is, what will it taste like? It is certain though that for all the work put into the garden it will surely be a delicious treat.

The best time to water your lawn is in the early morning. The wind and heat are usually less in the morning and the most water will reach your lawn and get soaked in to the ground instead of evaporating. Watering your lawn late in the day or evening will not harm your grass but might increase the chance of disease because your grass may remain wet all night.

Watering your lawn for a longer period of time and letting the soil dry out between watering will encourage the grass roots to grow deeply. Deep rooted grass has a better chance of withstanding a dry spell. Since weeds are usually at the surface of the soil this will prevent the weed seeds from germinating.

Watering during a drought:

Don’t water your lawn during a drought. The grass will naturally turn brown and go into a dormant state. Watering during a drought will not be enough to keep your grass green especially if your town has water restrictions. But it will keep your weeds alive since weeds have shallow roots.

Over watering your lawn:

Watering your lawn too much will keep the top layer of your grass wet and encourage grass to develop weak shallow roots. This could lead to a nitrogen deficiency because excess water will leach out nutrients from the root zone.

Watering grass on a hill:

If you have a trouble growing grass on a hilly slope it is probably do to a lack of water penetration into the soil. The water will run downhill before it can soak in. Increase the frequency of watering your lawn and decrease the length of time you are watering. This way your lawn will have more of an opportunity to soak the water into the soil before it runs downhill. Aerating your lawn to get the soil loose will also help with the absorption of water.

If you are ready to pull you hair out because your cucumbers are dying, being eaten by pests, or just aren’t growing right, you might want to calm down and read this article.

You need to watch your cucumbers when you grow them. They can suffer from various ailments that you can prevent and cure.

• First up is the cucumber beetle. These little pests, in addition to eating the leaves, can carry the bacteria responsible for bacterial wilt. The best way to stop them is to control them. Insecticides, covers for the cucumbers, and wilt resistance cucumber plants are all great solutions.
• Next up is the cucumber mosaic virus and the tobacco mosaic virus. These viruses can cause the leaves of the cucumbers plants to become deformed and turn yellow. The fruits can also become discolored and misshapen.

The cucumber mosaic virus can be spread by aphids (tiny insects) and other infected plants. If you find an infected plant, pull it up and destroy it immediately, before other plants catch it.

The tobacco mosaic virus is spread by smoking near the plants or by touching the plants after smoking. It can be prevented by washing your hands. Both of these viruses are incurable. Again, the only thing you can do is to pull up he plants and destroy them.

• Another cucumber sickness is misshapen or deformed fruit. Don’t worry its not a virus or an inscect this time, it usually means too much fertilizer or too little water.

If you have hollow cucumbers then you need to fertilize the cucumbers more. Another good thing to do would be to keep the soil moist around the plants. The hollow cucumbers are still safe to eat, but they may be a little bitter.

If your cucumbers are bent, like in a c-shape, you might want to water them. This is usually caused by hot dry conditions. It happens more in the late summer, though. It is also helpful to mulch the ground and add compost to it.

• The final cucumber calamity for today is powdery mildew. Powdery mildew is a fungus that spreads across the leaves of a plant a drains them of nutrients, sometimes killing the plant. It causes the leaves to turn brown and yellow and can kill the fruit.

The best treatment is to pick off the dying leaves and fruit and discarding them. Do not use these discarded leaves for compost, as they will infect other plants. Increase air circulation around the plant and keep it well watered and fertilized.

These tips and helpful hints will help you on your way to a cornucopia of fresh, delicious cucumbers!

Have a tip for growing cucumbers or your favorite fruit or vegetable? Click here to tell us all about it!