Attract Butterflies To Your Garden With This Fruity Snack

Gardening is a rewarding hobby, and it especially feels great when you've worked all spring to plant a bunch of beautiful flowers and walk outside to find them covered in butterflies. However, sometimes attracting pollinators — like butterflies — to your garden can take long-term planning and effort. While you can attract butterflies by planting more marigolds and other pollinator-friendly flowers, you also have to be careful about what flowers you choose to plant. Certain varieties that are well-known to attract butterflies are actually invasive and are bad for the environment, like butterfly bushes. Once you've chosen the best flowers for the job, it's time to plant them and sit back and wait for your efforts to pay off.

But, what if you have already planted your flowers and want to do something to attract more butterflies? In that case, the answer is watermelon. In fact, butterflies — including the red-spotted purple butterfly, monarchs, and painted ladies — love landing on pieces of bright pink watermelon in order to drink some refreshingly sweet juice. This is also a good way to use up your overly ripe fruits because the sweeter and riper the watermelon is, the more the butterflies will love it. However, before you go ahead and put an assortment of watermelons in your yard, there are a few things you should know so that you don't accidentally attract unwanted scavengers instead of butterflies.

The key when it comes to attracting butterflies with watermelon (and not a bunch of other critters) is to only put out a little bit of the overripe fruit. Butterflies will be completely satisfied with a small piece of watermelon or even with drinking the leftover sweet juices of a watermelon rind. It's also a good idea not to leave the watermelon out overnight to avoid attracting opossums, raccoons, or other nocturnal creatures. On top of this, you should make sure to change the pieces of fruit each day and replace them with fresh ones because they will go bad quickly after sitting outside in the sun all day.

Because watermelon is sweet-smelling and delicious, you are also likely to attract other insects with your offering of ripe fruit. While there's probably not much you can do about wasps (they are an important part of the ecosystem, anyway), to prevent the watermelon from getting covered with ants you can simply place the slices or rinds on a shallow plate of water which will prevent ants from getting to it. However, if you regularly put out overripe watermelon, you could still end up with unwanted critters getting their hands on it. In that case, you may want to hang the watermelon pieces from a trellis or a branch to make them harder to reach.