The Tiny Garden Feature That Has A Big Butterfly Payoff

You may be well aware of plants that will fill your garden with a variety of butterflies, but have you considered luring the delicately winged beauties in other ways? As much as butterflies depend on flower nectar to nourish their bodies, they also benefit from drinking mineral-rich substrates. This is often provided by a butterfly behavior called puddling, where butterflies (primarily males) gather on damp areas like soil, puddles, or even animal feces, to hydrate and extract minerals from the source. You can recreate this phenomenon at home and watch butterflies swarm in, by adding a puddler to your garden. A puddler is a shallow dish filled with sand, composted manure, and dampened with water. Sometimes the dish also includes pebbles for the butterflies to perch on or over-ripened fruit to drink. 

Making a custom puddler is easy to do using household materials you may already have. Plus, the benefits of bringing more butterflies to your garden is advantageous, not only for the health of your garden, but also for the well-being of local butterflies. The more butterflies that a puddler brings to your garden, means more pollination for your flowers. Meanwhile, puddling supports the butterflies' mating process, reproductive success, and, ultimately, the growth of their population.

While you can purchase a puddler online, like this one from Amazon for $10 you can also make your own. You'll need a shallow saucer, sand, composted manure, and water. Optional add-ins include rocks, salt, and over-ripened fruit. Taking your shallow saucer, this can be a drip tray from a pot, a pie tin, or even a deep plate, fill it with sand. Use enough sand to fill the entire dish. Mix in 2 tablespoons of composted manure. Dampen the soil mixture with water so that the surface of the soil is barely covered. 

The following optional items can enhance your puddler. Add rocks to create perches for the butterflies. These can be large stones or groups of smaller pebbles. Sprinkle salt on the water's surface to provide sodium. Lastly, over-ripened fruit is a delicacy to thirsty butterflies. Aged bananas, oranges, and apples can make your puddler an even more enticing place for butterflies to land. When your dish is put together, place it near a flower bed for butterflies to find.

Maintain your puddler by adding water as it dries out. This depends on your weather, so monitor the soil's dampness levels, closely. Every month, dump out the entire saucer and put a fresh set of sand and manure. Change out the fruit if it's excessively rotting, molded or infested with unwanted bugs. You can also make a similar water source dish with this simple Dollar Tree DIY.

Adding a butterfly puddler to your garden does more than just bring a number of butterfly visitors. The shallow dish is beneficial on a larger scale, too. Environmentally speaking, a butterfly puddler is supportive of butterfly reproduction. Male butterflies use the minerals from the puddler to make the pheromones they need in order to attract a mate in the first place. Moreover, a butterfly puddler ensures reproductive success because males transfer the nutrients from the muddy water to female butterflies, during the mating process. This in turn, creates healthier offspring.

The butterfly puddler also supports butterflies on a social level because it becomes a hub for butterflies to gather as a community. As a result, male butterflies have an increased likelihood of finding a mate at the puddler. Additionally, butterflies face a risk of habitat loss that puts them at risk. The number of butterflies in the world is on a steady decline, but supporting the pollinating insects with a puddler is an easy way to secure their livelihood in the long run.