How to Attract Butterfly Activity...

The flittering of butterfly through your garden is no accident if you planned your garden carefully. The adult butterfly flitters from flower to flower - sipping nectar from many flowers in your gardens, while other adult butterflies search for areas to lay their larvae. It is good to take note that butterfly garden is going to differ from other areas of your garden. Your natural instincts will be to kill off pests, larvae and creatures in garden, but in butterfly garden your best results are noticed when you use organic gardening: Which means no chemicals at all.

In you want to include use of butterflies in your landscape you will need to create a safety zone for your butterflies to feel safe. Butterflies frequent habitual zones, where they feel safe and where areas of landscape meet with tree lines. Creating your butterfly gardens near or around trees will help in attracting even more of these graceful creatures to your gardens.

A tip in attracting Black Swallowtail or Anise Swallowtail is this: Plant parsley, dill or fennel in your gardens, these plants attract this certain butterfly. If these herbs are not your favorites, you can attract other types of butterflies using other flowers. To attract Fritillary butterfly for instance, plant Lupine flowers your garden. Or you may want to consider planting Snapdragons to attract butterflies that are native in your own area. Your early butterfly gardens are going to attract butterflies only in passing, but creating and growing gardens that offer a safe haven for butterfly will urge them to stay in your garden.

Easter Lilies, and the Number One Gardening Question Right Now

Everybody asks about Easter lilies! Can they go outside; can I plant them in my garden? And to this I reply, "Why not?" Like other bulbs,there are two options if you plant your leftover Easter lily bulbs - either they will live and flower for many years (it is perfectly hardy into zone 4) or they will immediately die. If you don't plant bulb, it will definitely die. So you have nothing to lose by planting. Once Easter lily bloom has faded in house, cut stem back as far as you can. Grow plant in a sunny windowsill, keeping it moist (not sopping) and feed weekly with houseplant food. After all danger of frost has passed wherever you live, you can plant it outdoors. Planting outdoors is as easy as digging a hole and planting so that top of bulb will be three inches below surface. Add a shovel of compost and a shovel of peat moss to planting hole and ensure soil is well loosened. Remember it is necessary to dig a large enough hole to spread lily roots out and to ensure it is at least eighteen inches from another plant. Place bulb in bottom of planting hole and backfill soil up to neck of bulb – do not cover green leaves. Covering green leaves at this time could rot them. Wait until leaves have turned yellow and faded before totally filling in hole. After you've planted bulb, water it thoroughly. Carefully water and turn area into a mudhole so no air spaces are left around bulb.