Sep 27, 2022
This week, Matthew Dressing and Joanne Shaw welcome amateur butterfly enthusiast Lisa-Rae Cormack to the Down the Garden Path podcast to talk about harvesting milkweed and how to grow it from seed.
An HR professional from Whitby, Ontario, Lisa-Rae began raising monarch butterflies when she became an empty nester five years ago. To date, she has raised and released close to 400 monarch butterflies. This wouldn’t be possible without the monarch caterpillars' only source of food: milkweed.
What started as a small indoor project has grown over the years to incorporate an outdoor enclosure, vast pollinator gardens and two variations of milkweed. Her operation is coined “#FlyBeFree” and in 2020, she was officially certified as a registered monarch waystation by MonarchWatch.org. Through trial-and-error, Lisa-Rae has taught herself how to harvest, stratify and germinate common milkweed for this purpose.
Here are some of the questions and topics covered in this episode:
Each week on Down The Garden Path, professional landscape designers Joanne Shaw and Matthew Dressing discuss down-to-earth tips and advice for your plants, gardens and landscapes.
As the owner of Down2Earth Landscape Design, Joanne Shaw has been designing beautiful gardens for homeowners east of Toronto for over a decade. A horticulturist and landscape designer, Matthew Dressing owns Natural Affinity Garden Design, a landscape design and garden maintenance firm servicing Toronto and the Eastern GTA. Together, they do their best to bring you interesting, relevant and useful topics to help you keep your garden as low maintenance as possible.
In their new book, Down the Garden Path: A Step-By-Step Guide to Your Ontario Garden, Joanne and Matthew distill their horticultural and design expertise and their combined experiences in helping others create and maintain thriving gardens into one easy-to-read monthly reference guide. It's now available on Amazon.