my monarchs eat my milkweed down..no seed pods this year. But I do have seedlings pop up all over the yard. i have quite a few butterfly varieties visit my gardens. The one that I really love is the zebra long wing which is the state butterfly of Florida. The first few years i lived here I saw 1. Now I see them everyday! Having larval and nectar plants has done the trick.

I've got a patch of wild A. syriaca growing - of all places - in the middle of a woodland garden. It grows quite well, although it doesn't flower because there isn't enough sun. I tried to transplant all of it last fall to another spot. Well, only a couple small plants appeared in the new spot, and the old spot still had plenty of plants. So much for transplanting "all" the plants. LOL Perennial milkweeds can be transplanted but will take time to re-establish, plus they will also regenerate itself from old pieces of roots left behind. I've tried starting A. syriaca from seed, with limited success. The wild patches that planted themselves have done much better. Whether or not you still have Monarch larval activity depends on where you live. Very possible there are still caterpillars eating the leaves. You should be able to find them without too much difficulty if you take a look. I raise Monarchs and just found an egg on the common Milkweed 2 days ago! Very late for egg-laying at this location.

You need to look at some gardening videos on your computer, that is what I do during the winter months.. I have heard it more than once by gardeners. Saying they do not kill aphids on the milkweed, since they bring ladybugs into your yard. I personally plant milkweed for monarch butterflies, but since I have seen these videos, I no longer kill aphids on my milkweed. Sometimes the aphids might kill a plant, I just pull up the sacrificial milkweed. I have a yard full of ladybugs. In fact if you did not know it they swarm like bees in my yard. Its unbelievable!. I just could not believe it when I first saw it. Barbra

Woodyoak, I'm pretty sure vine milkweed covers a large area of the US & seems like I read it grows native all the way up into Canada. I believe planting milkweed makes people feel good and like they are helping and to a small degree I imagine it does help a small percent of them. Still, I can't help but think its just a tiny drop of 'fix' in a big bucket toward improving the larger problem of whats going on. A bigger problem is the situation in Mexico with the "handful" of remaining wintering shelter areas warm enough for large numbers of them to survive so they can make the yearly migration at all and make use of all that milkweed being planted in peoples yards. I certainly have the plants growing here to attract butterflies but we have been pretty short on many types of butterflies, not just monarchs, and those are just as big a concern to me even though they don't get the press coverage. Some years are good for butterflies, some bad. Sometimes fall is heavy, sometimes spring is, sometimes neither. It varies from year to year. I'm editing to add that the terrible and lengthy drought we've had throughout the mid section, which we are hopefully coming out of, probably did more to reduce the populations than tropical butterfly weed planted in peoples gardens which by the way isn't winter hardy except in the deep southern zones. Here is some good news. Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/9337/20141002/monarch-butterflies-expected-rebound-mexico.htm This post was edited by TexasRanger10 on Sat, Jan 17, 15 at 18:24