 |
Asclepias curassavica |
 |
| | The species has red-and-yellow bicolor flowers |
|
| | 'Silky Gold' |
A tender member of the milkweed family. We'd grown these years ago, but had fallen back upon their hardier cousins until this year. Spurred in part by their colorful flowers, and in part by their superior attractiveness to monarch butterflies, I decided to give them another try. I think they'll turn into a staple of our annual garden - not only are the flowers even nicer than I remembered, they successfully attracted a monarch mommy - we found their caterpillars by early August. The one pictured here is a little one, not nearly ready to pupate.
|
| | Late October - most of the flowers have gone to banana-shaped seed pods, but a few keep on providing their cheerful color well into fall |
|
In our garden, this plant grows in the following areas: Max's garden, , , back yard island Seed for this plant is included on my seed trade list About my plant portraits
PlantLinks to other web pages about Asclepias curassavica
Visitors to this page have left the following comments| Susan | Feb 01, 2009 | Hello :)
Wow! Love your site so far! I'll be planting 4 of these in our gardens this year. I am amazed by your not having a single aphid (not that I can see) on your plant. I had to hose them off everyday...and in the process I hosed off Monarch Cats and drowned the nearby plants...Good Grief! This year I'm going to plant some 'Moonshine' Yarrow nearby to hoefully attract some lady bugs...and Alliums to help deter some of the aphids.
With my luck, I'll wind up confusing all the bugs and the lady Monarchs won't even lay their eggs...LOL
I get aphids too on my milkweeds - but I'm not a tidy gardener, so I tend to let them be. Our garden should have a healthy population of good bugs, but not enough to knock bigger infestations of aphids out. |
| J. Imhoff | May 01, 2009 | Hi, Rob, Love your site and I'm always referring to it for details on your plants and butterflies. Thanks for all the info!
Now I'm wondering how long it took your A. curassavica to get to 'garden size' for the monarchs. I just started seed yesterday, and I'm wondering if it will be usable for the butterflies by the time they arrive in July/August.
Thanks. Judy
I start mine around mid-March, so you're about 6 weeks behind. But I think your plants will catch up quick enough - they wait till weather gets warm to really push. I also think I had some volunteer seedlings last year get to flowering size by mid-summer, and those sure didn't get started until mid-May. |
- Seed from '05 trade. 'Silky Gold' baggy 70F (27d) - 75F (100%G, 2d); 'Red' baggy 70F (21d; 40%G, 4-17d) - 75F (25%G, 3-5d)
- Seed from '06 garden. Baggy 75F (91%G, 6-11d)
- Seed from '07 garden. Baggy 75F (95%G, 5d)
- Seed from '08 garden. Baggy 75F (100%G, 4-6d)
I welcome comments about my web pages; feel free to use the form below to
leave feedback about this particular page. For the benefit of other visitors
to these pages, I will list any relevant comments you leave, and if
appropriate, I will update my page to correct mis-information. Faced with an
ever-increasing onslaught of spam, I'm forced to discard any comments including
html markups. Please submit your comment as plain text. If you have a
comment about the website as a whole, please leave it in my
guestbook. If you
have a question that needs a personal response, please
e-mail me.
Last modified:
March 11, 2009
Contact me
|
