May is the month Illinois welcomes back Monarch Butterflies

[May 16, 2022] By Zeta Cross | The Center Square contributor

(The Center Square) – May is the month Illinois welcomes back monarch butterflies from the mountains of Michoacán in Mexico, where they spend the winter. If you feed them, they will come.

It takes two to three generations of butterflies to reach the prairies of Illinois, Ken Johnson, one of the hosts of the Good Growing podcast and a horticulture educator with the University of Illinois Extension, told The Center Square.

He recommends gardeners have a variety of plants in their yards so that something is always in bloom – from May through September – if they want the monarchs to visit.

Milkweeds are the one key host plant that monarchs need in order to breed and lay their eggs. Long reviled as a weed, milkweeds are native wildflowers – popular again with home gardeners. Eleven different varieties of milkweed grow in Illinois. But milkweeds are not right for every yard, Johnson said.

Milkweeds can get large and aggressive. Try planting three or four milkweeds along a fence or in a corner of your yard. Or plant them in pots. Watch for monarch caterpillars, Johnson said.

In 2017, with the help of the Illinois Monarch Project, the Illinois Department of Transportation changed their mowing guidelines to allow native milkweed to thrive in medians and along highways, creating more than 80,000 acres of monarch-friendly habitat.

As impressive as that is, Illinois still has a long way to go to bring back monarchs in the numbers that we need. Every backyard gardener has a part to play in the regeneration of this important pollinator, the Illinois Monarch Project said. Johnson recommends the Illinois Monarch Project website for anyone who needs to know about making their yard a friendly habitat for Illinois’ official state insect.

Many home gardeners overuse pesticides and herbicides.

“Using insecticides, herbicides and fungicides defeats the purpose of having a pollinator garden,” Johnson said.

Being too rigid about how your yard looks can also defeat the purpose of having a pollinator garden.

“When we spray our lawns, we get a monoculture of grass that is not attractive to monarchs or any other pollinators,” Johnson said.

Johnson recommends tolerating some weeds. Violets, dandelions, clover and goldenrod that people commonly kill are powerhouse foods for beneficial insects and pollinators, he said.

Be willing to live with some damage to your plants.
 

“Having things feed on them, having a little disease on them is OK,” Johnson said.

Native plants are plants that occur naturally in a region in which they evolved. They are very hardy and drought tolerant – easier to grow than plants that originated in Europe or Asia. Bee balm, black-eyed Susans, coneflower, coreopsis, asters and blazing star are common native plants that will improve your backyard ecosystems and support birds, butterflies and beneficial insects.

Common ornamentals like zinnias and cosmos have an important role to play as well, Johnson said. Nectar-seeking butterflies love them. Plant them and they will be covered with butterflies all summer, he said.