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How to Create Your Own Rain Garden

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Building a Residential Rain Garden 🍃 So, you want to build your own rain garden. Lucky for you, it isn't a painstaking process and once you've finished it, you'll find your yard to be prettier and more efficient than it was before! Why Should I Build a Residential Rain Garden? Well, not only is a rain garden a way to beautify your yard, but also a way to employ the use of natural processes by... Temporarily holding and soaking in rain water runoff that flows  Removing 90% of Nutrients and Chemicals Removing 80% of Sediments  Draining 12-48 hours to prevent the breeding of mosquitoes  Preserving native vegetation Providing wildlife habitats for birds, butterflies, and insects Okay, I want to Build a Rain Garden. Where Should I put it? Where Should I Not put it?  When you are building a rain garden it is important to keep these points in mind about where and where not to build : They should be located in low lying sloped areas so water can poo
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We had a visitor to the Wildlife & Rain Garden yesterday:

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A Monarch butterfly!  By the looks of her tattered wings and worn scales, she probably was an  overwintering butterfly from one of the preserves down in Mexico. Meaning  she has flown nearly 1,000 miles in her short 6 – 9 month lifespan.  In the photo below (a bit blurry), you can see her depositing a single egg on the underside of the milkweed leaf. Milkweed, the Monarch’s host plant, is the only plant the adult will lay eggs on, and the only plant the caterpillar will eat. Different types of butterflies have different host plants, but the Monarch gets special attention because it is the species that migrates such great distances, and depends on healthy, native milkweed and nectar plants for survival. The more the landscape is changed for human needs, the fewer milkweed plants are available, threatening the migration. We believe this one made that long journey, bred in mexico, and found our milkweed to lay her eggs on!  Can you spot the tiny egg? Look
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This Week: Butterfly Host Garden through the year; What's In Bloom.

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A host garden provides the food plants for caterpillars and nectar sources for adult butterflies. Most species of butterflies feed on specific plants when they are caterpillars.  Our Host Garden provides host plants for the Monarch (milkweed), Gulf Frittilary (passion flower), zebra swallowtail (paw paw), pipevine swallowtail (pipevine), black swallowtail (fennel, dill, parsley). Host Garden: if you plant it...
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