Date: 02/18/2002

Number: 1

We started our garden in September 2001 and first reported it to Journey North on 11/02/01. Our garden continues to do well. We are surprised to see Monarch eggs, caterpillars, and butterflies in our garden at this time of year. It has been unusually warm in Orlando this winter. We have only had one frost in January around the same time the storm hit Mexico. The frost caught us off guard and damaged some of our plants. We trimmed back the damage and did not see any Monarchs for about three weeks. We thought they were gone, but they came back Our garden still has plenty of flowers and Monarch caterpillars are munching on the milkweed as we are writing this. We just had a crop of (about 30) big caterpillars (about 2 inches long) leave the milkweed plants. We think they are probably in the chrysalis stage somewhere because we found two in the “J shape” and brought them into our classroom to observe. We now have smaller caterpillars (about 8 so far) on the milkweed (most are about an inch long or smaller). We have observed that our caterpillars like to walk in the pile of leaves that are under the milkweed plants in the morning. We are fertilizing the milkweed plants with liquid fertilizer weekly, because we are trying to keep them with lots
caterpillars. Also, we have some new milkweed coming up from the seeds that dropped to the ground. Most of our milkweed is tropical milkweed with orange red flowers and a yellow center. We also have some milkweed that is golden in color. Right now it has buds that are getting ready to open if the caterpillars don’t eat them first!

Orlando, FL

Latitude: 28.5 Longitude: -81.4

Observed by: Barbara
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