Last spring I tried planted these in at least 10 different spots in my yard, trying both seeds and mature plants from nurseries. It was around this time that I noticed this small, familiar looking plant growing between my bricks, meaning that this was a random wild seed that blew in from god knows where.
Fast forward to this year and literally none of the other plants even survived the winter… Meanwhile, this sole plant appears to be thriving and just started to bloom.
by mgd234
17 Comments
Butterfly weed?
Milkweed seeds need to be stratified to break dormancy. It may be one of the seeds you tried before, but it needed to stratify over winter before it would germinate.
I have realized this year that butterfly weed doesn’t like to be pampered at all. If you use mulch or water it too much it doesn’t do well. But if you neglect it in a sunny dry spot it flourishes. It is a great plant for an area you don’t want to spend much time maintaining.
Your dill looks like mine 😂 they must be a soft root plant? Idk. Or they just love to lean
Of course!!! I have so much trouble with this one. They seem to disappear.
And, similar to your experience, I had a lot of stems bent and broken but didn’t remove them / and they’re still alive!!! How? God only knows.
Well you didn’t plant any of the others under a brick, did you?
Little tall for a paver filler plant though.
Soil has: Minerals, Organic Material, Moisture.
Minerals can be Sand, Rocks, or Clay.
Normally when we think of pampering our plants, we think… organic material like peat moss (which retains water) or compost (which has lots of nutrition in it).
Butterfly weed likes sandy soil that drains well. If your soil has clay and holds standing water? Yuck. Your soil has lots of rich organic matter and fertilizer? No thank you.
Place between bricks? Is there some… rocks and sand under it that allow it to drain quickly when it rains? AWESOME, LOVELY!
ETA: One thing I never encountered until recently was the idea of adding Sand to your garden bed to aid in drainage… that tends to be a pure potted plant kind of thing.
I’m in the same boat as you. I’ve been trying to grow it from seed for YEARS. I finally succeeded when I gave up, and just threw seeds everywhere then forgot about them. They grew in the most sun baked, nutrient lacking soil I have. WTAF.
My Columbine does that. I have tried seeding it and get nothing. Leave it alone and grows in the cracks of the driveway and sidewalk, go figure! So I let it seed itself and pops up in strange places 😂
My butterfly weed came back once then never again
Lol I tried to plan columbines in front of my house, both in pots and in the hellstrip, and they always immediately died so I hadn’t tried in a few years. This year, a huge one started growing and several smaller ones as well.
They do good with other butterfly weeds planted close to it.
Same here! Im starting to feel like asclepias tuberosa is going to be my white whale. I want them in my yard __so bad__ but they seem to hate my style of gardening or my soil or both. This is my second year trying to get some going from starts I bought at a nursery. Last year they were all in containers and they were SO miserable the whole time, some of them died almost immediately and the rest limped along and died a slow sad death. This year I tried putting some in the ground, and out of 6 starts only one is still going, and I just noticed a wilted stalk on it yesterday so I’m not feeling optimistic. I live in piedmont NC so our soil is basically all clay, but supposedly they are native here so I must be giving them too much attention and also the wrong site/soil. I’ll try again next year I guess 😭
Put a pot of dirt next to your volunteer and pointedly ignore it by not speaking to it.
I had given up on one of mine when it suddenly came up a couple of weeks ago.
Asclepias tuberosa tends to do that, it looks like it dies then it rises like a phoenix from its old crunchy first year growth as long as you keep it watered.
Milkweed!