Milkweed

Because we are more or less in this like unique zone where they're here all year round.

Milkweed is super important for caterpillars because that's their only food source.

But adult monarchs can nectar on a large variety of plants.

And so what I suggest is, again, check out a native nursery near you because that's where you know you're going to have loan maintenance plans that are going to benefit your local critters the best.

It's also how you get your, what are the little beetles that only the milkweed bugs, I think is what they're called.

Oh, yeah.

They only show up on Milkweed.

So and that's, you know, I'm trying to diversify.

But like also there's a strip of boulevard on in St. Louis.

Like, I think I say it in my book bio.

I really don't understand how most Americans can tell you in true detail like the Marvel Universe characters, but they don't know what Milkweed does.

So if my life can fix that in some small way, if everyone in America knows who Spider-Man's parents are and what their names are and what happened to him, I really hope while I'm here, I can help get stories about Dogwoods and Goldenrod.

and things like that part of people's stories.

If I made it earlier in the season, it might be more appropriate, but then I'd have to put it in the beater and that kind of loses all the milkweediness, the character of milkweed.

So it doesn't seem to be a good idea.

Milkweed's just maybe too wild.

Having said that, I'm sending out like a challenge to anybody out there.

Kamehito made from milkweed.

There's a monarch on my milkweed right now.

Donde buscaban la planta con flores perfectas para poner sus huevos.

Milkweeds are the best for them.

En inglés, estas plantas se llaman milkweeds, y en español se conocen como algodoncillo.

¿Si eres algodoncillo? [canta] No es algodón, no es maleza.

And amazingly, people around here are on board with that.

They are planting milkweed because that's the larva.

Milkweed is the host plant for their larva.

And there are stores right down in the little tourist town that I live in where they have a little section of milkweed planted right there.

outside their pond.

I think it's kind of a mixed bag.

You know, we spray our Asclepias for aphids, and I'm just kind of like, I know they're ugly.

They're on there.

That's what they get it.

They do this candy store of natives, and they bring in native plants from a bunch of different nurseries.

They sell them as plugs.

And one year we sent them Asclepias with aphids on it.

And we said, we can spray it first.

In those beds, there's milkweed growing.

That matters.

Milkweed attracts monarch butterflies.

Micah is on the team who looks after the garden.

I

Uh, bee balm or Monarda is, uh, one, uh, that will help overwinter the beneficials.

Uh, milkweed or Asclepias, uh, the seed pods that are there, uh, and the stems will actually help, uh, both of those, the, the native insects and, uh, other beneficials.

Goldenrod and asters, those are, uh, good winter habitat and late season, uh, seed for the birds as well.

[sighs] And then, um, Eupatorium and Ver- uh, I'm going back and forth with the Latin in my head, but, uh, ironweed is another one.

End of A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison by Paul Jennings.

The Common Milkweed.

An excerpt from The Wayside Flowers of Summer, a study of the conspicuous herbaceous plants blooming upon our northern roadsides during the months of July and August by Harriet L. Keeler, nineteen seventeen.

This is a LibriVox recording.

If we hold the seed in the hand a moment, the skein unwinds itself into a fluff of shining threads.

Each thread thrusts itself out and rests upon air, and here is a balloon." end quote.

End of The Common Milkweed, an excerpt from The Wayside Flowers of Summer, a study of the conspicuous herbaceous plants blooming upon our northern roadsides during the months of July and August by Harriet L. Keeler.

Read for LibriVox by Sue Anderson.