We made the mistake this year of buying a swan plant. It was a mistake because the plant that we thought had two caterpillars on it actually had nine. and nine hungry caterpillars made short work of one small swan plant. Six swan plants later and we now have 4 chrysalis, one caterpillar about to make another chrysalis and two small caterpillars still eating hungrily…what happened to the other two? We don’t know either.
The best part about have caterpillars as pets is that you get to see them making the change…
Sian has all the caterpillars named.
One good thing about rearing butterflies is that I discovered the NZ butterfly trust. They have a project that involves tagging monarch butterflies, and the site also has a lot of info about butterflies of NZ in general, and about making a butterfly garden.
Which of course I intend to do ….er maybe next year.
It seems that the best plant for butterflies in general is the buddleia. A quick search on the internet revealed that buddleia comes in a range of really cool colours, and not all of them are the pest plant frowned on by Doc. I found a lovely lady on trade me and now have a yellow and a blue buddleia winging their way to me.
The host plant I need 
more of is the stinging nettle. There is a native stinging nettle that the yellow and red admiral butterflies lay their eggs on.
I also need swan plants, but they have to be treated as annuals here as the swan plant is quite frost tender. Worth it to have more butterflies around though.
3 comments:
hi auntie corrine, i just wanted to say that i buy swan plants every year, and, um, kinda breed them, it's fun to watch them grow and transform into butterflies
This will be my first year without a swan plant in quite a while. Lovely to see this post about doing our bit, they do need us!
That's very interesting. Nice pictures too!
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