Monthly Archives: February 2010

Butterfly Gardening

How To Have A Nice Butterfly Garden

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Imagine the next time you join a discussion about butterfly garden. When you start sharing the fascinating butterfly garden facts below, your friends will be absolutely amazed.


What is butterfly gardening? Simply put butterfly gardening is the art of growing flowers and plants that will attract these colorful and magnificent creatures to our own gardens. A properly planned butterfly garden offers great joy to visitors of the garden by attracting these lovely flitting creatures for our amusement and delight. It also ensures a safe habitat for the butterflies.


Deciding upon how to design your butterfly garden is just a matter of personal preference on your part. In reality, butterflies simply do not care about the style of your garden, only the plants that attract them. Typical points to consider for choosing your butterfly gardening plan are the size of your garden and the types of flowers and plants you want to grow. Pick a style of garden that appeals to you and ensure it contains the plants and flowers that appeal to the butterflies you wish to attract.


It is important to do thorough research on exactly which plants and flowers will attract certain species of butterflies. Speaking of butterfly species, do you have an idea of what kinds you want to attract to your garden? Do you know which ones live in your area? Once you work out this decision and decide which types of butterflies you want flying around and visiting your home, then simply create your butterfly gardening plan around those species.


When building your butterfly garden be careful how you coordinate the colors you choose for your flower beds. Although butterflies do not care about your choice of color, it’s better to plan ahead. You want to avoid having your butterfly garden looking like a hodgepodge of unrelated colors and textures that could create confusion to you and maybe even the butterflies.


Some people find it helpful to draw and color a layout of their butterfly gardening plan to see what the finished product would look like. Keep in mind that warm colors like red and orange are flashy and showy. These colors have a greater impact against a strong green background. Cool colors such as blue and purple are soothing and toned down and would work better with a white contrast to create the look of freshness and brightness.


Lastly, here is a brief list of plants and flowers that you can look into when designing your butterfly gardening plan. They are the honeysuckle, sunflower, milkweed, summer lilac, Valerian, daisies, Purple Coneflower, Yellow Sage, day lilies and lavender.


Think about what you’ve read so far. Does it reinforce what you already know about butterfly garden? Or was there something completely new? What about the remaining paragraphs?


When creating a butterfly garden, the possibilities of what to include in your butterfly garden design are endless. Below are some suggestions to help get you started when designing your butterfly garden plan. They are designed to spark the creative process of your mind and get you started on your way to creating a lovely and well-suited butterfly garden.


– First, before you even begin your butterfly garden, find out which species of butterflies are in your area. Consider taking an exploratory hike around your location with a butterfly identification book to find the butterflies that dwell close to your property. This may take a little extra time and some research on your part but the results will be worth the effort. After you have compiled your list of local butterfly species, be sure to write down in your butterfly garden plan what these particular species of butterflies use for nectar and food plants.


– Be sure that your butterfly garden plan includes a location that provides at least six hours of sunlight per day. Butterflies are cold-blooded creatures and therefore, do better where they are warm and sheltered.


– Wind can be a butterfly’s worst enemy so be sure to have plenty of wind protection in your butterfly garden design. You can plant tall shrubs and other plants in order to create a wind break. Know the direction of your area’s prevailing winds. The first choice, however, is a nice ‘tucked away’ location that avoids heavy winds.


– Keeping the above points in mind, choose a suitable location to have your butterfly garden. The best of all worlds would be a butterfly garden placed on the south side of your home with windbreaks on both the west and east sides. You may also wish to be sure that you are able to view you butterfly garden from inside your home as well as provide seating outside from which to observe the antics of the butterflies.


– If your area permits, a possible suggestion for location of a butterfly garden is provided by Barbara Damrosch in her book Theme Gardens. She suggests the use of an old basement or home foundation if such is available around your home or the place you wish to have your butterfly garden. As an alternative, you can excavate an area and build a stone wall around the excavation to simulate an old construction foundation. Remember to covered the bottom of the excavation with several inches of gravel where you do not intend to plant your nectar and food plants for the butterflies. This will save you from a muddy walk through your butterfly garden after a rain.


There are many creative ways for constructing a butterfly garden. Take your time to design a garden that you will enjoy and be proud of later when all is said and done.


That’s how things stand right now. Keep in mind that any subject can change over time, so be sure you keep up with the latest news.

Michael Hehn writes articles about various topics.
Find out what he has to say about butterfly gardens at Your Butterfly Garden

Worms and Worm Farming

Worm Farm Composting-Going Green in a Worm Way

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Worm farm composting is a time tested and efficient way to enhance your recycling efforts that can be accomplished with the help of our little friends the worms. As one of Mother Nature’s tools for breaking down organic wastes, worms are capable of providing efficient waste conversion with some interesting side benefits as well.

Worms are one of Nature’s key components in the composting process. Composting is the process where biodegradable waste material is broken down and converted into a soil like substance called compost. Worms actually eat these organic wastes and food scraps. After they’ve digested and broken them down, the “poo” that comes out, a soil like substance called worm castings, can be gathered and used for fertilizer for flower and vegetable gardens, fruits, and lawns as well. Sort of a Mother Nature “Garbage In, Gold Out” can be the result.

Throughout history back to the time of ancient Egypt, savy farmers realized and used these little helpers to enrich soils and get better harvests. Flowers have been known to actually bloom before their regular seasons when worm compost has been mixed with the soil.Vegitable and fruit harvests are known to yield up to a twenty percent increase, with better flavor and crispness. And the soil benefits as well with plants having a higher resistance to diseases and pests, reducing the need for herbicides and pesticides.

Entrepreneurs caught on to this as well over the the years. Worm farming has long been known as a successful “niche business” in several ways. Many garden supply shops carry bags or boxes of worm farm compost or castings as fertilizers. And, with the increase in home gardening due to our current tough economic times, the demand should go up. And while the “night-crawler” reigns as king for fishing bait, what school-boy fisherman hasn’t dug a can of worms from out back and taken his bike fishing. Sporting goods stores do quite a seasonal business of the little wigglers. In recent years, a thriving online industry has developed as well for both the castings and the worms and accessories as well.

One of the biggest benefits of worm farm composting to consider is the portability and adaptability of the process. A home scale worm farm can be crafted with a container as small as several inches deep and wide by say 18 inches to a couple feet long. Worms are sensitive to light, heat, and vibration, so take these factors into account. Your worm farm can be started on a back porch or patio, or in the back yard or garden, so it’s adaptable to urban settings as well. Just side towards cool, quiet, and shaded, and you should see success. Add some moist paper, leaves, or cardboard and some soil, then add worms. Feeding your worms is easy. Toss, stir, or mix in your food scraps, yard clippings, or plant waste, and let them go to work for you. They consume up to their own weight per day. There are some things you wan to avoid like meats, salts, andacidy items like onions and citrus, but this information can be found on the web and in a variety of books on the topic.

These simple steps scaled to your needs or goals, will get you started on the path of organic gardening in a very simple but effective way. As noted earlier, we are seeing and should continue to see a rise in interest of home gardening as an offshoot of the economy. Our grandparents and generations before learned to work with Nature to survive, and as a society we face a return to some of this nearly lost knowledge. So just “being Green” could be the fashionable term today, but from a practical point of view, there’s plenty of benefits to having your own organic garden today, and some simple worm farm composting can be a big help in many ways.

Organic gardening, going green, recycling, and being self-sufficient are just a few of the reasons our society is seeking and rediscovering forgotten skills and knowledge. Find out more about worm farm compost and worm farms at Worm Farm Compost or at A Worm Farm.