Hello smilieface33: There are a few different online sources that offer milkweed plants for sale. However you need to confirm that they do not use any type of pesticides on the plants that will harm the caterpillars. I have added the link to a nursery that does not use harmful sprays. Good luck. Here is a link that might be useful: Milkweed plants for sale

jennyinmn if you have any questions please post. We all want to help you have satisfactory results with your prairie planting. You might want to investigate the following ideas: If you keep smothering your vegetation over winter you can pull off the cover come early spring and allow whatever weeds are still active to present, then you can follow up with an application of roundup which is often a necessary evil to speed up the prep stage. Wait about a week after applying the herbacide to see if it needs an additional treatment, then treat again. Then, if you Winter-Sowed your transplants (lots of info about Winter-Sowing on this forum), you'll be ready for planting and watching your prairie emerge. There will be lots of weeding the first year, but having killed off the vegetation for a full year prior, will have gone a long way to keeping your planting relatively weed free. If you still want to direct sow your seed, it might be better to keep smothering until fall 2011 (this will give more time for killing off weeds and the sod will have broken down more), then pull off the plastic and again check for weed growth same as above. Treat with herbicide if needed. Then you can throw your seed down late fall/winter 2011 to emerge the following spring 2012. In the meantime, keep your seeds fresh in the fridge.

When you pull one of these weeds, if the roots smells like carrot, it is Queen Anne's Lace. If the plant is hemlock, it will have a replusive musty smell sometimes described as smelling like a mouse. What does a mouse smell like? Normally, but I will not say always because there are some different species of QAL and they don't all look the same, the QAL has tiny hairs on the stems. The stems can be solid green or solid green with teeny tiny red pinstripes. The poisonous hemlock has some purple splotches on its stems. Some QAL, but not all, have a dark flower, variously described in different sources as red, maroon, black or purple, in the center of each flower cluster, but this can be iffy and inconsistent and is not necessarily a reliable indicator. The species of QAL that grows wild at our place never ever has had the oddly colored flower, only the creamy white ones. If you have the QAL, when the plants go to seed (don't let them!), the seed heads curl inward on themselves forming something that looks a little like a bird nest. Also, the poisonous hemlock usually needs wet ground to grow but QAL can grow in wet or dry ground. And, poisonous hemlock gets taller and more spread out, though the QAL flower heads will spread out a lot and have less tight flowerheads as the seeds mature, so the flower spread isn't always reliable.

Deannatoby-I'm growing coneflowers for the first time this year so we'll see if they fool me too! Some of the flowers that looked like weeds to me last year (Nicotiana, Nigella) I now know of two main weeds (which I wasn't sure of at first) that try to overtake my giant hill that i'm trying to turn into a wildflower meadow. but there are some others that came up last year but only one or two of them and I waited to see what they were and they got gigantic and my husband convinced me they were weeds so I finally pulled them. I just figured if they were weeds there would be more than one or two of them. There are some others that came up last year but only one or two of them and I waited to see what they were and they got gigantic and my husband convinced me they were weeds so we finally pulled them. I just figured if they were weeds there would be more than one or two of them. Here are my mystery gigantic loner weeds that I still think might be nice flowers :)