Ep. 215 Get to Know Asclepias (Milkweed) 2025 plant of the year | #GoodGrowing

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator at the University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Mac Omb, Illinois, and we have got a great show for you today. The plant of the year. Really not the plant, it is more like the genus of the year. We're going to be talking about Asclepis.

And then, like, if we'd write that out, it would say Asclepus species or SP dot dot dot dot dot dot, you know, because we're gonna be talking about many different types of Asclepus, also known as milkweed. And you know I'm not doing this by myself. I am joined as always every single week by horticulture educator Ken Johnson in Jacksonville. Hey, Ken.

Hello, Chris. So is it Asclepus or Asclepius? Doesn't matter.

No. I read it and I don't say it. Let's I'll go with myself as Asclepius. What do you say?

I I always said Asclepius.

Oh, no. Well, just so people

know we're talking about the

same thing. We are talking about the same thing. Asclepius. I mean, that sounds more Greek. Yes.

I like that one. Fancier. More fancier. Barkeep, give me my Asclepius, please.

Thank you when you say it.

That's right. Or otherwise, it's nurse, give me my Asclepus. So but but we're talking about a a genus of plants. And when we say genus, plant species are described in in two terms. Genus, which is usually capitalized, and it it encompasses multiple plants.

And then we have the specific epitaph or epiteth. How do we say words anymore, Ken? I don't know. But it's the word in the binomial naming system that of taxonomy that we name plants. We use Latin.

And so that specific epitaph or I always called it species, like, even though the two in itself described the species, I often would say that word in that binomial name is the species.

Again Technically. Mhmm. Technically, yes. The specific epithet. Yes.

And the species is genus and specific epithet together. At least that's what I was told and I wanna say he got in trouble, but got in trouble in class for not doing it right.

It it impacted his GPA, and so he'll never forget it. But listen to Ken. He's smart. He knows what he's talking about. Yes.

Those two words, they describe a species of plant, animal, whatever, you know, living thing. And today, it is as asclepius, asclepus. I don't I don't this is gonna

be rough. Okay. Sorry. Never should have brought that up.

That's alright. It's alright. Milkweed. How about that? Let's talk about milkweeds.

Let's do it. So I think so there's there's, like, 200 some species worldwide of Yep. So I guess we should back a little bit. So when we say milkweed, depending on what you're reading, milkweed may just be Asclepias Asclepias, Asclepias. But sometimes there's also some other genera thrown in there.

But for today, I think we're, with the exception of one plant, we're going to focus on Asclepias Asclepias. So there's 24 species in Illinois of milkweeds. And I guess in the broad sense, I think it was there 19 18 or 19 if I counted right, that are actually Asclepias, Asclepias, then a couple others from from the other genera that we sometimes lump in to milkweed. So and then 200 species of Asclepias worldwide. So there's and I think when we think about Asclepias, especially in a garden setting, you know, we're thinking of, like, a handful of plants, but there are quite a few species out there.

You may not be able to get them for your garden, but there's there's more than just a handful we typically see.

Yes. And as Ken said, there's, you know, 200 species worldwide. But for the most part, they describe this genus as more of they call them new world plants. So, you know, North South American plant species is where they primarily would find these growing in their native ranges. Although you can find, you know, milkweeds in in Europe, Asia, Africa.

Like, they are they're a global genus, but the broad majority of them can be found in their quote unquote new world category of plants. So it was something that was discovered by European explorers that would bring them back to Europe to be described then by by botanists. And actually, one of the illustrations of the kind of poorly faded Roanoke colony, one of the illustrations that that survived it because a lot of other things didn't was an illustration of Asclepus acericia. How do we say how do we say these names, Ken? Cyrica.

I know it as common milkweed. But yes. Asclepus cerica cerica?

I don't know if I've ever said it out loud.

I know. I like, you don't say these words out loud. You read them. Cerica, cerica, cerica. We're gonna put the text down below here, and you can read it yourself, folks, and make up your own mind.

Yes. Common milkweed, that was one of the botanical drawings of this that that we know about. And then once we got up into, like, the mid seventeen hundreds, Bladnaeus then got his hands on this, and he started categorizing this in his binomial taxon taxonomic system. And the Sclepus, as it is today, is in the dogbane family or apostinaceae. The the dogbane family has a lot of other plants in it.

Again, we're not really gonna talk about it. We have native ones here, like we have just the native dogbane, which they have very similar flower structures, similar fruiting structures. And they were lumped together a long long time ago, hundreds of years ago. But it wasn't until like the eighteen hundreds that they noticed that the flowering structures of of Asclepus Asclepius was different than other dogbane families. And then they pushed all of the milkweeds, all of that genus Asclepus out into its own family, into the Asclepidaceae family.

And that's where it remained until about, you know, nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties, we started working on genetics and looking at plants much more closely than we ever could before. And that's when they noticed like, you know, genetically speaking, these plants in the dogbane family and the milkweed family, they are they are more closely related. They belong in the same family. So now a sclepus is a subfamily in the dogbane family and the Apostinaceae family. And so that that's kind of the the his the broader history of of milkweed taxonomy and where it belongs in the in the literature, so to speak.

But but, Ken, there there's there's other things to know about milkweed, like how we how we use it outside of the garden. I know one of them, you know, we have volunteers that they're baby boomers. Some of them, you know, we we even have some of the greatest generation volunteers still kind of hanging around there. And they tell stories about when they were kids and they had to go and pick milkweed pods to supply the World War two effort, which the pods were primarily used in flotation devices for the for the navy.

Yeah. And the fluff, whatever the technical term for that is. I don't know what it is. I'm sure there is one. I think that sometimes it is still used for, like hypoallergenic pillows, like the stuffing, for pillows and stuff.

So I think it's it's got a waxy coating on it so it kind of repels water too, which is probably again why you would use it in any flotation device as well. And I think indigenous Americans would use some species of milkweed to make fiber because they're kind of fibrous stems and stuff, so use that to make rope and stuff like that. Because, there's there's additional uses. Think some used for some species for medicinal purposes. I would not recommend doing that nowadays.

We probably have better things. And milkweed is toxic too. So it's it's one of those where the dose makes the poison. So a little bit may be helpful, but too much is not going to be helpful and cause problems itself.

That's correct. Yes. And there was a professor at WIU. He spent many years, you know, seeing if milkweed could be an alternative fiber crop. And I think the results were pretty promising, but milkweed has kind of a negative connotation in the farming industry.

And I think the main roadblock they were running into was just the idea of planting milkweed on purpose. I mean, I still run into that when we're talking about you know, maybe we're we're we're talking at a class, public, we're at a booth or a table somewhere at an event, and someone asks about monarch butterflies or pollinators, and we we mentioned milkweed. Oh, man. If you're they're a farmer, they're not too pleased about the the suggestion of milkweed being planted on purpose.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing pollinator presentations and oftentimes the spouse will say, my husband will kill me if I plant milkweed intentionally in our flower garden and stuff like that. Don't run into that as much as I used to when I started.

I think there's a little more acceptance now. And I think the the species you pick can can help with that too. But yeah, I think there's still some some pockets of resistance to to milkweed out there.

Yeah. Well, I think in general, milkweed, if you look at historic weed science literature, it is described as a minor agricultural weed. Really was not an issue when it came with a lot of, like, crop health. But because of its fibrous nature, it gummed up machinery. It it it affected the combine as it was rolling through the field.

And so in in some of those milkweeds, they can grow in these big colonies. You imagine, like, an older generation combine trying to move through a fixed stand of milkweed pulling the corn out of the field, might affect things a little bit. So but but yeah. So I that's one of those, I think, again, a lot of our our baby boomers and and maybe moving into some of our Gen Xers, maybe our older Gen Xers, they spent their summers with a weed hook, and one of the plants that they knew to pull out of those rows was milkweed. So, you know, there's there's a lot of love to hate this plant out there.

Yeah. I think still I think you come across a little bit more in Southern states, but the extension publications on managing milkweed in pastures and stuff because it's toxic to to livestock and stuff. So there's still it's still trying to be managed Mhmm. To this day.

Yeah. That is true. That is true. Well, since I mean, I'm not growing acres of corn and soybeans in my yard, this is definitely milkweed is definitely a plant that we can put in our garden. And because we have, you know, nearly a dozen species which can be found in Illinois, they can't all be that bad.

Right, Ken? Like, we we we have some choices here, don't we? We can use these in our landscape.

Correct. Yeah. So I get the others. Well, there's an half species. You know, some of these so I've I've got the list here.

I can list them off real quick. We have sand milkweed, poke milkweed, tall green milkweed, and I'm not gonna do the scientific names because I don't know how to pronounce most of them. Swamp or rose milkweed, woolly milkweed, which is endangered in the state, Mead's milkweed, which is endangered in the state, and I think federally endangered or threatened, ova milkweed, which is endangered in the state. White swamp, purple, whorled, showy, narrow leaved green milkweed, which is endangered in the state. Prairie, common, butterfly weed, variegated, horsetail, green, green flowered.

So, you know, we've got all those, honestly, before we really started looking at this stuff, I haven't hadn't heard of probably half of those, before. Just, we don't commonly encounter them, at least in the horticultural trade. Like the ones we do, probably butterfly, butterfly weed, tuberosa, the orange flowered one. I think it's probably, at least when I see milkweed, that's usually the one we most commonly see. It's a smaller species, it fits well into a garden.

Swamp or rose milkweed. I think moving I think a lot of garden places or nurseries and stuff are moving towards more of the rose instead of swamp milkweed name because it doesn't have to grow in swampy conditions. And I think the reasoning for that is people hear swamp, think you need wet conditions so they don't plant it. But you can do it in your average, moisture soils. So that's incarnata.

Yeah. It's a pretty popular one. It's not terribly aggressive. World milkweed, that's one I haven't seen too much and I've never personally grown, but that's another one we see. Showy milkweed, a little bit bigger, bigger flower head, than some of these other types.

Or probably I would say the four that we most commonly see and would fit well into a garden. I plan to show you last year, so it hasn't spread too much. So I can report back in a few years. I may have to retract that statement. But the other three I know, I don't think move outside of seed.

They don't, you know, spread. Like something like a common milkweed, which is probably the one that gives milkweeds a bad name. That's the one that gets it's big, it's aggressive, We're readily spread. It gets quite large. So if you're planting the cinna, your typical home landscaping, very good chance it's gonna take over, if you're not actively, managing it and kinda cutting it back and stuff.

Ken, you know, you've you've planted a few of those. So do you have a a favorite amongst those those that you have listed here? Is there one that you would say you kinda look forward to seeing that bloom or you you look forward to seeing that grow every year?

Yeah. I think the the butterfly, we've had that in our garden the longest. So that's kind of self seeded and it's relatively easy to pull when it's small. So we've got some patches here and there and the bright orange flowers, are pretty attractive. On a side note like that one, there's there's a lot of variation I've noticed in those flower colors.

A couple of years ago we were driving down the Southern US, Southeast and they had stuff along the roadside, like I almost had to stop because it was like a red orange. Was a very, very different color. The stuff we have in our yard is more of a bright orange, but this was like a red orange, like borderline red, on it. So there there can be some variation within those flowers. I don't know if that's more like the Southern eco type is more of a red orange or that's just happened to be what we saw along the interstate and stuff.

Yeah, probably that one, the other two, the the swamp rose and the showy, we haven't been growing quite as long. This is the year. Our showy is blooming this year, for the time. And it's it's pretty impressive. We can I'll take a picture.

We can pop it in here. But it's got a nice big, I guess, umbral, right, flower of flowers on it. So

Mhmm. Yeah. My I I would say I I really like the swamp milkweed, or I should I should start calling it rose milkweed. And mine is just about to bloom. I mean, the the the petals are almost open here.

And so I, yeah, I can pop a picture in of of that going on right now. That's one that I look forward to. And I do have mine sighted and kind of the lowest spot in my yard. It stays pretty wet in terms of, like, soil moisture conditions. And I have planted swamp milkweed in in other parts of my yard in, like, my pollinator garden where it lasted about a year or two years.

And then I collected pods off of that, and then I I planted it, the the seed down below in in that wet spot there where I had it. And it's really it's thrived there. Whereas where I had it up in the drier area, it really it didn't only lasted a couple years, which I could keep it going if I just kept putting the seed down in that one spot, just kind of smash those seed pods where the base of that plant was like, ah, I'll just keep keep it growing. And you know what? I do recall on our trips down south, seeing a lot of butterfly weed, that orange flower along roadside, especially, like, I think along 57 south of Marion, Illinois.

You get south of there, and there's just along the roadside, there's just a lot of that orange butterfly milkweed out there. And that's often the one I like the habit of that one because it's sort of rounded or mounded. As you said, more contained. The the the leaves seem a bit more stiff, more rigid. But it that's the one where when people say to me, hey, I want to, you know, have pollinator I wanna have a pollinator garden or what flowers can I plant?

And then when I mention milkweed and they start to, you know, they they they pull their hand back to slap me, I say, woah, woah, woah. There is this one species of milkweed. It's called butterfly weed. It's very well behaved. That's usually my gateway milkweed for a lot of people.

The just to try that one, see what you think, and and and then, you know, maybe you can branch out into other species in the coming years.

Yeah. Yeah. I'd agree with that. Yeah. That's your your gateway drug And I think that looks a little I think would fit in a little bit better in more of a formal type garden, at least in my opinion, than some of these others.

These others some of these others can look a little look a little wild. Sometimes, where butterfly weed has a little more of that manicured look to, I guess, for lack of a better term. Yeah.

And these are, for the most part, wild selections. I am starting to see cultivars pop up in nurseries. So that's just something to be mindful of. We don't necessarily need to get into the wild versus cultivated debate right now, something that, you know, whether or not your tolerance level for a cultivated plant, native plant, whatever that is, you will find you'll start seeing these more often. I actually I think I've seen a swamp slash rose milkweed cultivar in our local native plant nursery pretty recently.

Yeah. We got a those herbaceous perennial plants by Alan Armitage, and he's got a couple cultivars listed. So for swamp, you've got Cinderella. It's got larger rosy pink flowers, more compact more compact flower heads, apparently have a vanilla fragrance to them. There's nothing I've I've never really smelled milkweed flowers, but I've always read there's supposed to be fragrance.

I think milkweed smells great. Yes. It has a great fragrance.

You have to go outside and start smelling them now. Swamp, I know some more swamp, ice ballet, white flowers, soul mate, rose purple clusters. And then for butterfly weed, the gay butterflies, mix of yellow, orange and red flowered forms. Hello yellow, yellow flowers. So yeah.

I think it's I mean, I think it's if milkweed continues to be, as popular as it is, I I would expect we'd see more as people get into to breeding or finding some of these Mhmm. These colored morphs and all that stuff.

And I guess maybe we should have said this sooner, but with all these different species of milkweed, how do know you're looking at a milkweed? One of the ways I was taught was look at the flower. Like, so milkweed and this is kind of true for a lot of the other dogbane related plants, but, you know, generally speaking, milkweed, when we are looking at the flower, we have five flower parts up and five flower parts down. That is one of the, you know, basic ID characteristics you can use when looking at milkweed, also other dogbane plants. But that that that's the thing I think, you know, that you can look for.

You know, I think a lot of these plant families, they have this one thing that really stands out like Asteraceae, you know, they they have kind of those ray flowers and so that that can help ID that start the identification process. When it comes to these milkweeds, five flower parts up, five flower parts down.

I usually break off a leaf, look for milky sap.

That's another You could do that except I think it's butterfly weed. Does butterfly weed I

don't think it has a whole lot.

Yeah. You gotta, like, really squeeze that plant that leaf to get that milky sap out of there.

It's not like common milkweed when you snap it and it just starts oozing

out of everywhere and it's sticky and it's just it's just latex y white sap, which is toxic. And interestingly, the monarch caterpillar which has coevolved with this plant has mouthparts that prevents the triggering of the sap flow while it's munching on these leaves. So it can eat entire leaves without triggering that sap flow of this plant.

Well, should we talk about monarchs a little bit? Milkweed? Probably should.

That's usually the reason people are interested in them. Yeah. Probably should.

So I guess this will kind of go we ascend to like pollination and stuff. So, you know, so new monarchs and other butterflies will visit the flowers of milkweed to drink nectar and stuff like that. But they're not necessarily the best pollinators of that. So like from the plants perspective, you probably think of monarchs as being a pest. They don't really do a whole lot of pollination because, milkweeds, the Asclepus has a pretty unique way of getting pollinated.

So they, when we think about pollen, most plants, we've got the pollen grains that are released this fine dust, with the Asclepias, Asclepias, they've got the Polinia, so this is basically a sack that the pollen is contained in. It's them and some orchids are the kind of the two groups that have this. So this pollen is within a sack. So when and there is a, a document let me find this real quick. From, USDA, natural NRCS Natural Resource Conservation Service on milkweed pollination biology.

We can throw a link to this, into the show notes because I don't know if we can take pictures good enough to show some of this stuff because this is going to be pretty zoomed in. But basically they've kind of got this unique structure where they have these pollinia, there's there's two of them and on the flower, there's a stigmatic slit on there. So basically when an insect lands on this flower, it's kind of waxy, they have a hard time gripping on, it'll go into the slit, their foot, mouth part, some part of their body will get caught in that and it only allows them, the leg or whatever, to go up. So they'll kind of work their way up into this plania. There's some other structures that are kind of clamp down on whatever body parts is caught in there.

They're able to pull their leg out, and it's attached to them and they'll go around visit other flowers and then while they're doing that, if that leg, if it's stuck on leg, it gets caught again and it goes into, that stigmatic slit again, that plenty goes in there just right, into kind of this tube, it'll pollinate the plants. So that's why they're not, it's, it's a pretty complicated system to get pollinated. And I'd say it requires a degree of luck, almost because you've got to get everything lined up just right to get this pollination. So it's really one reason why we don't see more seed pods on milkweed just because you've got to get everything lined up, just right. And that was pretty a pretty crude, description.

It makes a lot more sense if you can see pictures. We'll try to put pictures in here or we'll put that paper in the in the show notes so you can actually see, what they're talking about. But it's it's kind of I don't know. It's pretty unique. Went down a little of a rabbit hole.

Learned about that.

But well, you need the right insect for the job too. I mean, I I think after this, I'm gonna go out and look more closely at milkweed flowers and see if I see any insects that might be stuck or dead because they got caught in these pollinia and they you know, maybe they're not strong enough and they just can't pull their their leg out. There's, you know, some instances in this paper, they talk about insects missing legs because of this because of the the way pollination works on milkweed flowers. So, it's kind of a violent act for these poor, bees and and wasps, it seems like, were the more common pollinators in in this case, larger ones.

Yeah. Bigger, bigger, stronger insects. So something like a if you ever looked at a butterfly legs, they're not terribly thick and big. So I would imagine they can probably get out of there, relatively easily without picking up those pollinia. So again, they're not necessarily transferring a lot of those.

So they're probably not doing a whole lot of pollination, for milkweed just because the way they've evolved this kind of unique system of spreading their pollen and getting pollinated. So more of a pest. And then which leads to, you know, those those toxic chemicals that milkweed has has developed. It's it's an arms nature is nothing but a giant arms race. You know, so the the milk the cat monarchs start feeding on it.

Milkweed starts creating chemicals that are toxic. Milkweed or the monarchs figure out a way to detoxify those who are not affected by them, and it just kinda keeps going back and to the point now where basically you have these specialist insects feeding on the milkweed because it's gonna be toxic to just about anything else. But these other, things, you know, the monarchs, milkweed, tussock moth, milk, swamp milkweed beetle. There's there's a whole community of insects that feed on on milkweed. They've found ways to detoxify this or or avoid, those chemicals so they can feed on it.

Fascinating. It is quite a rabbit hole to go down and to realize just what is happening on on milkweed plants. You've said it before, Ken. I've said it before. Milkweed's kind of like its own little world.

There's so much happening on there. There's so many specialized insects that might you might find on milkweed. I mean, there's monarch butterfly, but we also have the milkweed bug. You know, it's just just an insect that is you will find them on these. You know, I'll probably say this wrong, Kim.

They have piercing sucking mouthparts. They feed on the leaves, but they also go in, they'll feed on the seeds, right? If they can get into that seed pod and they'll damage the viability of a lot of your seeds. Correct?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Large and small milkweed bugs, milkweed beetle.

They're probably under aphids.

Yeah. We we focus on on monarchs because they're the big charismatic ones. But there's a lot of other insects that are gonna rely on it. You know, just because other things are feeding on your milkweed, you know, we as humans have decided that the milkweeds or milkweeds should only be for monarchs, but there's other things that feed on it. So if you have that, I would encourage people not to get rid of them because those most of those things are gonna rely on that stuff, as well.

And a lot of times they're eating different parts. Like the tussock moths, they, like, feed tend to feed on older leaves, whereas monarchs are more feeding on the newer leaves, the softer stuff. So sometimes these things aren't necessarily even in in competition, with monarchs either. Yeah.

But, Ken, milkweeds, monarchs are synonymous, and people are probably just like, well, when are they gonna tell us what is the best milkweed for a monarch butterfly? So what's best? Do we is there a is there a clear winner? You know, what do monarchs prefer?

Yes. Let me got too many tabs open. So there was a, this is some research done in Iowa. It was published in 2018, but they went and looked at, what was it, Monarch? Nine different species of milkweed.

So they monitored these plants, they looked at egg laying, they looked at larval survivorship and stuff like that and what they found. So larval survivorship, is they designated as high if over 60% of the larvae reached adulthood, less than that, was considered low. Over position use, so how often they were laying eggs on it. If it is high, it's the top of the plants. Medium is the middle Low is is the bottom.

So this is some of this stuff is relative to the other species. And they also looked at or they this table, we can put a link to this article in the show notes again too. They also looked at ease of establishment, from plugs, and stuff too. So they looked at poke milkweeds, this had high larval survivorship, medium oviposition use, but it was difficult to establish from plugs. Tall green milkweed, low larval survivorship, medium oviposition use, difficult to establish.

Swamp milkweed, high larval survivorship, high oviposition use. So they lay lots of eggs on them, a lot of larvae survive, it's easy to establish. So this would be one. If purely doing this for monarchs, Swamp milkweed, rose milkweed would be one to look at. Showy milkweed, high larval survivorship, medium oviposition use, again it's easy to establish.

So another possibility, not quite as good as swamp, but another good one. Prairie milkweed, high larval survivorship, medium oviposition use, medium establishment. Common milkweed, high for larval survivorship and oviposition, use and easy to establish. But again, doesn't work all that well in a lot of landscapes because it can be rather aggressive. Butterfly milkweed, high level larval survivorship but low over position use.

They don't use it very much. They don't lay a whole lot of eggs on them compared to others. But they do still recommend this one, as kind of a late season larval host. I think it kind of survives or sticks around a little bit longer than some of these other species. World milkweed, high survivorship, below oviposition use, easy to establish, but so probably not one you want look at because they're not going lay a lot of eggs on it.

They have tiny leaves. Yes.

And then one we haven't talked about, we will in a little bit, honey vine milkweed, which is not in a Scalapus asclepius, but is is lumped in with them. Low survivorship, medium oviposition use, very easy to establish. So again, not recommended. So the ones, they're recommending, and this is for restoration use, but again, you could translate this into a home landscape would be swamp milkweed, curry milkweed, common, but again, use that with caution because it will take over if you're not careful. And then butterfly weed as a late season.

Again, they don't necessarily lay a whole lot of eggs on them. Again, it's a smaller plant, smaller leaves. But they do the the caterpillars do a good job of surviving on it as well. So

And I would say just anecdotally, that sounds about right. I do tend to find quite a few caterpillars on my swamp milkweed mid to late season. Late season, that might be an incorrect statement, but but later in the summer. But once we get towards that tail end of that migration generation, you know, towards the tail end of them, my swamp milkweed looks terrible. You know, maybe about early fall.

You know, there's hardly any leaves left. It's ready to give up the ghost, and that must be why they're talking about butterfly weed there for that late season leaf food source for the larvae. But, yeah, that that all seems to line up anecdotally. I did think for some reason in my head that world milkweed would be more desirable because it has daintier leaves and maybe would just be more palatable. But no, because the leaves are tiny and the females she can't get her ovipositor there to lay the the egg properly.

And the way the female lays her egg is she bends her abdomen underneath and and lays that egg on the underside of the leaf because a monarch caterpillar hatching can drown in a single drop of water. So that's why they lay their eggs on the underside. Caterpillar hatches, eats its egg case for the most part, and then kind of around that until it gets a little bit bigger into its next instar stage, and then it can start being a bit more adventurous on the milkweed plant.

Yeah. And with that world, they they survive well on it. Yeah. They just you just don't get a lot of eggs. And and for the like, for the the butterfly weed, you know, when we planted that, kids were a little bit younger, they were still into insects and looking at stuff with me, not so much anymore.

But we would go out and look for them and we'd never nothing, nothing, nothing. And then usually that August, September time frame even that we would start seeing caterpillars. And there's a few years where we found some, we had a hard frost coming in. It's like, well, we're going bring these inside and rear them because they're not going to survive this frost. Yeah, we definitely see that they didn't really start showing up, least in my yard until later in the year.

Yeah. I I would say also with like our swamp milkweed. So we do farm progress show extension usually has a display there. For the last few few times we've done it, we've done pollinator garden displays where we brought in pollinator plants. One of those was swamp milkweed, which I was holding over in my backyard until the the event.

And when I brought it there, unbeknownst to me, these plants were covered in monarch caterpillars and which was a great demonstration to have during an event. I also did though get a very disturbing video of probably a Chinese mantis eating a monarch caterpillar, which I can pop in here, but I don't know if people really wanna see that because it's it's a little gross.

I think it'd be cool.

Alright. I'll do it then. Here it is, folks. Enjoy this monarch caterpillar being eaten by a Chinese, I think Chinese mantis. I doubt it's a Carolina mantis.

You're gonna add sound effects?

Oh, yeah. Like munching kind of gross block of the like a zombie eating something. Yeah. Hey, Ken. You did mention one in that list there, which we haven't covered.

You said it's not technically a milkweed, but a lot of people call it a milkweed. And also it can have it can support monarch caterpillars as a larval food source. Honey vine. I've also heard it called blue vine. It has a couple synonyms in terms of scientific names.

In our notes, we have it down as sinacum sinacum, lava, or lavia. I've also heard it called ampullamis albidus. But either way, it is an aggressive weedy vine, which I have seen debates on the social medias about people saying, my yard is covered in this crazy vine that's going everywhere. And then once they identify it as a as honey vine, as a larval source, food source for monarch butterflies, then the debate happens of should I pull it or should I keep it? I will just say from my own personal experience, when we purchased the home we live in right now, it was October.

I noticed on many of the shrubberies that there were these little pods hanging all over the place. And I was like, well, that's interesting. I don't know quite what that plant is. I cleaned it all up. And then spring tame springtime came around and just this everything just started getting eaten by these honey vines.

And I just it took me a to identify it because it does look kind of like a kind of like a field bindweed almost. So that's what I thought it was at but then I noticed, well, on one, there were monarch caterpillars on. I'm like, well, why would there be monarch caterpillars on field bindweed? And then doing a little bit more digging, realizing, oh, this is honey vine, also known as blue vine. And I was like, I'm sorry, caterpillars.

Like, this this plant is eating my my my yard. So I do control it. I have not sprayed it. I usually just pull it and then it just comes back from the root system. And I've been doing that for five years now.

And there's a particular one, it's right by where I turn my hose on. Every time I turn on my hose, I just pull it, little sprout that's growing up. And for the last five years, at least once a week, it it still is there even though I barely let it live, like survive to photosynthesize. Now I throw a couple pictures of these various honey vines growing in my yard because undoubtedly I'll be able to find something.

Yeah. We've got, on a fence, chain link fence, one year. They grew up. And yeah, it's, we've been dealing with it ever since. It's like in our bleeding hearts.

And I get and that'll twirl around stuff. And a lot of times you don't notice it until if it's growing in a plant until it's pretty big and so intertwined that you're just ripping the other plant apart, trying to get in. So but yeah, some people do leave it. It's it is a native plant. So, you can grow to be like 20 feet long.

So if if you are going to grow it, you are going to let it, survive. Be careful about where you're gonna put it because you will be dealing with it for a while, if you if you don't if you wanna get rid of it. And I haven't I haven't sprayed just because it's interspersed with all kinds of other plants that spraying wouldn't be practical to do that. But unless you wanna be constantly out there picking, pulling up, exhausting that root system, spraying is probably gonna be your best bet to manage it quickly anyway.

Yep. And I've been very good at picking it and just reminder, it's been five years and still picking. I think the previous homeowner just kinda let it go, though. So they weren't very active out in the yard anyway. And and maybe that is a good example of the site or the scale of your site.

If you have acres of prairie, oh, yeah. Honey vine would be a good plant. Common milkweed would be a good plant. For a smaller, you know, sized garden bed, landscape bed, probably not as appropriate.

Yeah. Where it's you're looking at somewhere where it's gonna be contained by a by a sidewalk. Mhmm. Personally, and even then, it still may be able to work its way under there and pop up on the other side for both of them.

Yep. Alright, Ken. Well, we've just told them how to kill one of these plants, or to maybe perhaps recommend killing one of these types of not a sclepis, but a related milkweedish type plant. But let's say we wanna promote a milkweed plant. Maybe we want to like in my case, I have a swamp milkweed.

How do I go about have getting more? How do I propagate this plant so I can have more in my landscape?

Yeah. So in the fall, you know, those seed pods, they're certain green and they will start to brown and eventually they will open up and they will release their seeds and they have the fluff. I should really look up the technical term for that.

No, it is the fluff.

The fluff will catch the wind and they will blow away. But if you don't want that to happen, you know, as the seed pods start drying down, opening up, you can collect those seeds. I think typically people would remove those fluff. That fluff, can put them in a bag, shake them around, knock that off. And our the milkweeds are going to need, cold moist stratification.

I think typically the recommendation is about thirty days. So you put seed, put those into flats, put them outside in your garage, put them outside for the winter, let that natural cycle go. What I do, we'll do a lot or when we planted them by seed in the past, we will put them, we'll put them in a flat or in a container. We'll put them in the refrigerator, for for a month, month and a half just to be safe, bring them out, put them under our lights, and get them germinate. But you've gotta get that stratification, in order for them to germinate.

You don't do that, you're not gonna have very good, very good success growing them from seed.

And and I'll add that research project from WU where they studied milkweeds, that professor, they had really dialed in, I think, that germination process where he had described it to me as, you know, two weeks in the fridge, pull it out for two weeks, then two weeks back in the fridge, then pull it out, and then two weeks back in the fridge. So basically, you're you're cycling through this three times. And then he described it as getting near 100% germination, you know, just so there's sort of that. It's just mimicking that cycle that we do get in the winter of cold to warm, cold to warm, or really freezing to thawing, freezing to thawing. And so that that seemed to do it.

So if you're really gung ho about germinating some milkweed seed, you know, there are some procedure process that you can do to to really make it very efficient. I did do a a little project with some WIU students a few years ago, seven years ago, eight years ago now, where we did test milkweed seed that had been cold moist stratified for thirty days. I think one for fifteen days and then one not at all. We did get some germination of the not at all seed, but definitely not really comparable to the the thirty day cold moist stratification. And I wish, you know, the students had submitted all their lab reports for that on the on the WU, like, I don't know, assignment submission website.

Mhmm. I wish I had downloaded that so I could actually have the germination rates because I I didn't record it. They recorded it in their lab reports, and I never I failed to ever download it and and record it. I just said, hey. They submitted it.

A plus.

It's floating around there somewhere.

Maybe. Somewhere in the the digital ether, it is there.

So when it comes to, like, planting them, this is one a plant where you wanna make sure you pick your site wisely because they do not like being transplanted. So make sure you get them where you want them. Or if you're buying, you know, plants and pots, be careful not to disturb that root system too much when you're planting, but especially when they get established. You could try to move them, but don't get I wouldn't get my hopes up too high about having a tremendous amount of success moving them around. Yeah.

They they don't like it. I I do recall one of our former guests, Lane Kanoki, he discussed some of his his better transplant successes with with milkweeds. I can't remember the exact species we're talking about, but he had he had described whatever it was a specific species that they're they're planting plugs in a garden, but they were deep cell plugs. I mean, you're talking, like, six inches or more, I think, of a cell of a plug that was able to sort of give that plant a good deep root system. That way it's not as disturbed when you're taking it from the plug into the actual garden.

So Ken, I I don't do much to my milkweed. I kind of maybe pull a couple other competing plants. We do have a couple of those haemurocalis fulva, those ditch lilies as I call them, the orange orange day lilies. I kind of push those back. I'm mean to those.

I I don't control aphids on mine. I don't do anything like that. I don't know. There's not too much maintenance, don't think. But there are some people that about midsummer, they like to cut down their milkweed.

And this might be more for the common type milkweed or maybe those more fibrous y, you know, stiffer leaved types. That way once we get towards more towards that migration generation with the monarch butterflies, we have brand new growth, fresh growth that might not be as quite hardened off as some of, you know, some of those older leaves might be a little bit more tougher for those monarch caterpillars. And so I know a lot of people do that. There's also a strategy when it comes to mowing. So highway departments, there are windows of time when you can mow ditches or fields that might contain quite, you know, lots, vast quantities of milkweed to minimize the impact to to kind of feeding or breeding monarchs.

And I believe that that really does vary depending where you're at in The US. You can link to a I think it was a blog post I did many years ago called it mowing for monarchs, I think. But for the most part, least where I'm at, Ken, I think you might be a little bit different than Jacksonville. But we can pretty much manage milkweed, which by manage means cutting it down or mowing it anywhere from like October 1 to May 1. You know, we don't expect to have very many monarchs in the area at that point in time.

Of course, there's exceptions in certain years. And then you sort of leave it alone. But if you do have a time in the middle of summer where you need to to cut it down, it's usually, like, July 1 to July 20. You know, that's your your mowing window for the summer, at least where I'm at in sort of that Northern Western Central Illinois area in Macomb. I think yours might be a little bit your windows might be a little bit different because you're farther south than me.

Yeah. I'm not sure. I don't know if I've ever looked to see when that window would be. So maybe a little bit later since they'd be a little bit later getting down here.

Let's see. Where are you there, Ken? There we go. So for you, you know, general all purpose maintenance, October 15 to April 1. And then for you, if you need to do a summer haircut, July 1 to July 20, there's like sorry.

There's like four different blue colors on this map. Having trouble distinguishing which blue this is. I think that's the correct one for for your area around Jacksonville. A little bit darker for me, October 1 to May 1. If you wanna give your milkweed a summer haircut, June 30 to July 10 for more than northern part of Illinois.

So I'll post a link to that particular publication down below.

Yeah. As yeah. As far as milkweed in my yard, yeah, I'm kinda same as you. It's whatever happens happens. Yeah.

I don't do anything with we get the oleander aphids, the yellow ones all the time on there. If you watch closely, you got a lot of other things going on. They're eating them. And if you wanna see some parasitized aphids, find a milkweed. You can pretty much find some parasitized there.

You can find leafy beetle larvae feeding on them, lacewing larvae, surfeit fly larvae, all kinds of stuff. Know, because you got your own little little community of insects, feeding on on the oleander aphids. And, you know, there's one question I get you, you probably do too, probably all of us around the state get, you know, I've got aphids eating my milkweed. Mhmm. What should I do?

I again, usually I would leave it now if it's completely coated, you know, you could go through and smoosh them, just put your hand on there and squish them all. You're gonna get a little dirty. You can also spray them off with water. The problem with it was smashing them or spraying them off with water, if you've got any monarchs on there, especially if they're really little, just hatch or eggs, you're probably smooshing them and washing them off too. So there's a there's a bit of a balance there.

I can't tell you what what the right the right way to do it or, you know, you've kind of got it's not gonna be up to the individuals how much how risk averse they are when it comes to to managing that stuff and then potentially impacting the monarch caterpillars on there.

Well, can so we've talked so much about Asclepius. Asclepius? Asclepius. What what who who named this plant the the plant of the year? Like, what are who has this power and authority?

Yeah. So if you're a long time listener going back to the spring, earlier this spring, I guess, yeah, we're still in spring. Right?

Yes. Yes. I technically. Yeah.

Yes. Tech technically. So it's the year of, you know, Dogwood, Monstera, peas, calendula, all that stuff. So that's National Garden Bureau. And the last the one the only one we haven't covered yet, well, we have covered now, was year of Asclepius Asclepius.

So National Garden Bureau is the ones who who declared this the year of Asclepius.

Wonder if if I had that power, what would I declare plant of the year? I don't know. A question a better question for another day because I think we've already hit our time limit for this episode. That will be the next one. What would we declare as plant of the year?

It's too many to pick.

Flip a coin. Mhmm. Go through a list and close your eyes and point. That's right.

Well, that was a lot of great information about milkweeds aka Asclepus, as I say, Asclepius, as Ken says. You say it how you wanna say it, folks. There's there's more ways to say this one word. Well, the Good Roy podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Enroth. Hey, Ken.

A special thanks to you hanging out and chatting all about this pretty massive genus. Mean, it's not massive. There's bigger ones out there, but but boy, it was a lot of good information today.

Yes. Thank you. I learned some new stuff. I'm gonna have to go smell my milkweeds now, see what they smell like, because I've never done that before. And everybody else should too.

And let's do this again next week.

Oh, we shall do this again next week. What a busy time of the year it is. We got our grow along growing along and all other kinds of things going on. So we're gonna have a guard bite for you next week, folks. Well, listeners, thank you for doing what you do best and that is listening or if you're watching us on YouTube watching.

And as always, keep on growing. Have we beaten the milkweeds with a stick?

Yeah. I'm trying to think. Is there anything else?