Butterflies are facing a crisis with habitat loss, pesticides, and climate change, and butterfly gardens provide food, shelter, and water for a butterfly’s four life stages: egg, caterpillar, pupa, and adult.

A butterfly garden should have a sunny location for nectar plants and larval food plants.  Nectar plants provide adult butterflies’ main food as they pollinate. The sun encourages nectar flow, and helps adult butterflies maintain a body temperature of 85 to 100 degrees F, so they can fly.

Plants should be grouped in bold colors, as red, pink, yellow, orange, and purple, with garden rocks to add heat.  Some wonderful nectar plants are butterfly bush, butterfly weed, lantana, purple coneflower, coreopsis, aster, black-eyed Susan, liatris, Joe-Pye weed, zinnia, chives, and bee balm.

Females lay eggs on larval food plants so growing caterpillars have food. These plants include wildflowers, trees, shrubs, and grasses. Host plants are specific for butterfly species.  Eastern black swallowtails search for dill, parsley, and rue, whereas monarchs search for milkweeds, such as butterfly weed. Good larval plants include aster, blueberry, dogwood, milkweed, parsley, fennel, tulip poplar, and oak.

Butterfly gardens need shelter from wind, and a shallow pool to provide minerals and water. Include both annuals and perennials with varied bloom times and plant heights, avoid chemicals, and be sure no one pulls caterpillars off the parsley!

Here is a question to answer. What do these people have on common?

Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis, Rosalind Carter, Luke Bryan, Ned Jarrett, Reba McEntire, Julia Roberts, Trisha Yearwood, Archie Manning, Jennifer Needles, Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Faith Hill, And Jimmy Carter.

All of these people were, of course, 4-H members.

In addition to these famous people, since WWII there have been 25 governors, 35 senators, and 80 members from the US house of representatives who were all 4-H members.  Most all of these celebrities and legislators credit their confidence, leadership and speaking skills to
4-H.

4‑H is America’s largest youth development organization—empowering nearly six million young people between the ages of 5 to 18 with the skills to lead for a lifetime. 4-H’s mission is to “grow greatness” by helping develop young people who are empowered, confident, hard-working, determined, responsible and compassionate—seeing a world beyond themselves so that they have the life-long skills to succeed in post-secondary education, and careers.

At the “Growing Greatness” 4-H Achievement Celebration on March 17th, the Moore County 4-H Program and the Moore County Extension Staff celebrated the 2022 accomplishments of Moore County 4-H members and their leaders. Some of the accomplishments recognized included: 4-H’ers who took on leadership roles as club, county or district level officers; youth involved in the Moore County 4-H Teen Council; youth involved and active in 4-H community clubs; youth who completed, competed, won awards, or were honored for their participation in county and district 4-H project record book competitions; youth who made oral presentations and won awards for competing at county, district and/or state competitions; youth who were awarded trips to 4-H State Congress, NC Citizenship Focus and/or 4-H district retreats; members of the 4-H Horse program who competed and placed in the District Horse Bowl, in the district Horse Artistic Expression competition, and/or in the district and state horse show riding events; 4-H’ers who raised and competed in county, regional and state livestock and poultry shows; and youth who participated and attended Moore County 4-H day camps, 4-H residential or 4-H residential specialty camps.                   

Moore County 4-H members, have their futures ahead with the opportunity to go where they want to go, so, speaking on behalf of the Moore County Extension staff, we are honored to serve the youth who have chosen 4-H as a path to help them achieve greatness and reach their goals to “Make the Best Better” for all of us!

To find out more about the Moore County 4-H Program and the opportunities available for youth, contact Moore County 4-H Agent, Kaley Lawing at kaley_lawing@ncsu.ed or call 910-947-3188.