How to Attract Butterflies to Your Garden. Four Hacks That Always Work
Work in the garden is a perfect way to relax and calm down. You can enjoy the colours of the flowers and all the vegetables you have grown. Merely looking at them is a soothing experience that will cheer you up even on a terrible day.
Are flowers enough to attract butterflies, though? Here is what you need to do to fill your garden with butterflies.
What to do to invite butterflies to your garden?
Appropriate plants
First of all you need to encourage them with appropriate plants. In the spring sow asters, night-scented stock, calendula and alyssum. This plants provide butterflies with most food, that is why it’s worth having them in your garden. They are annual plants so if you prefer shrubs, try buddleia (butterfly bush)
Bananas
Fancy hundreds of marvellous butterflies in your garden? Attract them with a banana skin. Put in anywhere you want the insects to appear and wait for it to work. You must be patient – the butterflies may appear within a few days.
A butterfly feeder
Since we put up birdfeeders in the winter, why not do the same in the summer, just for the butterflies? They should have vertical holes to protect butterflies against bird predators. The feeder ought to be 20 – 50 cm over the ground so that butterfly caterpillars would be able to get inside where they can transform. As the name suggests, it might be equipped with a shelf to drop some food, for instance pieces of fruit or sugary water.
Nettle
Few of us like nettle, especially in our own garden. However, if you are really keen to have more butterflies there, you’d better let a few of them grow there. Butterfly caterpillars prey there, some of them lay their eggs there, too.
