Do you absolutely love butterflies but you aren’t sure how to get more of them to show up at your home? There are quite a few things you can do to make your home more attractive to butterflies and help them to feel at home.
We want to share with you some of the best tips for bringing butterflies into your yard and around your house.
Keep the Predators Away
Did you know that butterflies have some natural predators? It’s true, and their enemies are birds, snakes, rats, and wasps.
If you want butterflies to come around your home, then you should be keeping these kinds of animals away. It can be tough to keep birds at bay, but it helps if you don’t have any avian pets at your home.
You’re less likely to see butterflies around if there are birds constantly on your property.
Keep checking your property regularly to make sure that you’re keeping these animals away, and you have a better chance of seeing butterflies at your home.
Plant Lots of Flowers
When you are planting flowers to attract the butterflies, make sure that you’re not just planting plenty of flowers but also the wide variety of them.
The greater variety of flowers you have at your home, the greater variety of butterflies you are likely to see.
Butterflies like flowers with open blooms, and they particularly prefer yellow and purple flowers. Butterflies feed off of flower nectar, so make sure that you have flowers in your yard that have plenty of nectar to offer them.
If you’re not seeing a lot of butterflies around, but you do have plenty of flowers planted, try planting the flowers in different locations around your property and try some different varieties of flowers as well.
Make sure you’re also choosing flowers that are good for your location, as those will tend to be healthy and attract more butterflies.
On that note, also make sure that you take good care of your flowers and keep them well-watered and fertilized so that they can bring in the butterflies.
It’s not just flowers you want to plant, though. If you would like butterflies to make their home in your garden, you have to give them a place to nest.
That means planting milkweed, which is where they like to lay their eggs. Milkweed may not look as attractive as a garden full of flowers, but once the butterflies start coming around, you’ll be glad you planted some.
Don’t Use Pesticides and Other Chemicals
Consider the kind of products you’re using to kill pests, protect your plants, and even clean your home. You want to try to avoid using artificial chemicals or toxic chemicals for any of these purposes.
Butterflies are very gentle and fragile creatures, and it doesn’t take much to kill them. The kinds of chemicals that may not bother you could be deadly to them, so try to use natural cleaning supplies and natural pesticides as much as possible.
If you hire a cleaning organization for your home, you can ask them to use green cleaners or gentle cleaners that don’t leave behind much of a scent and that don’t have any toxic chemicals in their makeup.
Look for natural alternatives to using any kind of potentially harmful chemicals. You ought to know that even some natural cleaners and pesticides can be dangerous to butterflies, so choose your chemicals carefully.
Set Out Water
Butterflies don’t just drink nectar. They can drink plain water as well, but you have to make it attractive for them if you want to bring them to your yard.
You can buy a butterfly feeder or make one yourself, and they prefer water they get out of sand placed around a flower bed.
In this way, the minerals from the soil can get into the sand, and the butterflies can drink that off. This gives them both water and minerals in one location, and it’s a good way to keep butterflies coming back to your property.
Make Safe Spaces for Them
Butterflies like to feel safe, because they don’t have much in the way of defense against their natural predators.
They prefer little nooks where they can hide, particularly during the cold months. You can create safe spaces for them throughout your garden or yard, making sure there are some dark nooks and awnings where they can hide themselves away.
That means you may not always see them when they are present in your yard, but they’ll definitely be hanging around more often.
They prefer to hide in natural-looking locations, like inside logs, under mushrooms, and in trees. If you can provide places for them like this where they can easily hide and feel at home, you should see them more than you would otherwise.
Keep Butterflies Out of Your Home
Butterflies may like to come into your home, but they shouldn’t stay there. It’s not safe for them to be indoors for very long, because they’re not getting the fresh air and nutrients that they need.
If butterflies get trapped in your home, they will slowly lose strength and energy and die. You want to get butterflies out of your house as gently and quickly as possible and try to make sure that they can’t easily get into your home in the first place.
These are just a few ideas you can use to make not just your yard but your entire property attractive for butterflies.
Many people forget to think about what they do inside their home and how it affects butterflies, so we think it’s important to bring that up and remind you that your home plays a part in making your property attractive for them.
