I also gathered half a peanut butter jar of seeds to plant a larger patch this year. The hardiness zone for Butterfly Weed is USDA zones 3-9. The pods will ripen, open, disperse their seed and die back to ground. By late Summer to early Fall, seed pods will form. From 5 plants I counted at least 16 Monarch caterpillars at one time and the plants still looked good. Rapidly it will grow to a height of 1-2 and bloom by early Summer for about one month. Also interesting to watch the process from the butterfly laying eggs to the butterfly hatching. It was so top heavy with blooms that after a couple of back to back thunderstorms it laid over but it quickly filled in the hole and had you not known it, you would have never been able to tell. sandhill milkweed seed collection, storage, and germination as follows. Not only is it hard to find orange blooms in a native plant but even better once the flower is dead it is still bright orange and quickly falls off the plant on it's own so you don't have a bunch of dead, brown blooms to look at or cut off. The larvae of monarch butterflies are entirely dependent on native milkweeds as. The flowers may be the best feature of the plant. Had the Monarch caterpillars not eaten all the buds it would have been blooming profusely through mid-September. The second year it was loaded with blooms from mid-May through the start of September. It typically grows in a clump to 1-2.5' tall and features clusters (umbels) of bright orange to yellow-orange flowers atop upright to. Started from seed in June and it bloomed a few flowers that year. Asclepias tuberosa, commonly called butterfly weed, is a tuberous rooted, Missouri native perennial which occurs in dry/rocky open woods, glades, prairies, fields and roadsides throughout the State (Steyermark). This might just be the perfect native plant.
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