How to Make a Homemade Butterfly Garden

Looking for a unique way to landscape your back yard? How about making a homemade butterfly garden? This garden can attracts several species of butterflies. It also gives them a permanent place to live and reproduce.

These beautiful creatures can give you, your family, and your visitors, hours of entertainment as you watch them flutter around your backyard during their daily routines. A butterfly garden can also help you teach your children about the life cycle of a butterfly.

The first step is to choose a suitable location in your backyard. The area should be large enough to grow several types of flowers in. The soil should also be well-drained. And, the location needs to be cleared off and in a sunny spot.

The butterflies will need plenty of exposure to the sun in order to keep warm. You see, insects are naturally cold-blooded. So butterflies will "sunbathe" in order to keep warm.

On the other hand, if the weather is too hot, the butterflies might escape and hang out in a nearby shaded area.

Your homemade butterfly garden will also need some type of housing for your inhabitants. The housing can be as simple as planting shrubs and bushes. Or, it can be a little more complex by using butterfly boxes. The boxes, of course, offer a better level of protection from the elements. This is especially important for the females of the species. The females look for shelters that will protect the eggs they lay.

(Out of the eggs will come small caterpillars. They then become pupas. The last stage is becoming an adult butterfly.)

Your homemade butterfly garden will need to contain plenty of colorful, nectar-producing flowers. You'll need to choose plants that bloom at different times throughout the season. Annual flowers bloom the entire summer. That way, the butterflies will always have food close by, and they will stay around. Having food at all times will also attract new butterflies to inhabit your garden as well.

This patch of brightly-colored flowers surely attracts different species of butterflies.

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