hello my beautiful friends how you do today it's Chris here ya know it's kind of weird to see me in the flesh so I don't you guys remember last year we actually did a bunch of tadpole and toad pull videos and I had a bunch of fun doing them and you guys seem to enjoy them as well so I figured why not do something kind of fun again so this year we're gonna do monarch butterflies but this isn't just because there's actually a reason behind us monarch butterflies are becoming becoming endangered they're not endangered yet but there's less and less and less over over the years and there's a couple reasons why but we'll get into that a little bit later on so this year I'm gonna be making videos about monarch butterflies we're gonna raise them from the caterpillars all the way up to beautiful butterflies and release them into the world so that being said that the first step is usually somehow giving milkweed so today I'm going to show you guys how to grow your own milkweed and that will help you and race your butterflies now this isn't the only way to get milkweed milkweeds fairly common in a lot of areas and that's why these butterflies flourish pretty much everywhere look we'd such a common plant so monarch butterflies only eat milkweed that's how that's why it's extremely important for you to get milkweed somehow they will not need anything else and this is extremely important for the butterfly they don't get their milkweed they won't get the basically poisons that are growing the milkweed and they won't end up being poisonous and everything will eat them so let's show you guys how to plant these it's actually quite simple they're a milkweed so I know weed is kind of that weird weird definition where it's just mostly something we don't like but a grow was really really easy so you shouldn't have any trouble growing it so what you want to do is get some sort of seed tray or seed pops something like that and basically just pop some seeds in there it's as easy as that's the way I like to do it I like to keep everything consistent and neat and nice of course if you want to you can just pop random seeds in all over the place that's fine but I like to make little sauce I like to plant my seeds now how deep should you plant your seeds that's the first thing is how deep should you plant your seeds usually you want to plant them for almost any seed you want to think about the longest so the long side of the seed and planned it two times as deep as that which now would say this is about a sixteenth of an inch seed so we're gonna plant them about an eighth of an inch in deep that's an approximate the length it's not it doesn't need to be perfect those far as soil goes you usually only use some sort of special specially designed see the formulated soil because it helps aerate the seeds and just keep it kind of nice but it's not a necessity and again we're growing milkweed it's gonna be really easy to grow so I just grabbed some random dirt that I had laying around the house I popped them in there and they're gonna grow just fine in there so once you get your once you get your soil all set up in your seed trays usually want to get a little bit higher than what I have right now but I ran out of one so she's gonna have to deal with it make sure you water it in really really good that's the first step water in an all the way now you don't want to go so crazy as to have like extra water in there but you do want to completely soak the dirt you want to be completely I don't the best word for that would be but you want the dirt to be as soaked as it possibly can be without having any extra water in the dirt what you do that get ready to plant the seed so we're gonna make a little trough right here I basically did all of that already and then you got a little trough right here where we're going to plant our seeds I've actually got what a few seeds already planted in here again about an eighth of an inch so I'm not very deep at all because these guys need quite a bit of warmth and have a lot of humidity as well so what we want to do just drop them in there it's as easy as that man just make your trough and just drop them in there it doesn't matter how far you've heard of a part I don't know an inch or so you want to be able to make sure you when you you know plant them in something else you can still keep them separate you want them all bundle together you want the roots all tangled up because it evolving the tiny little roots if you have them too close together you're gonna break all those tiny roots which are important for the plant to grow if you didn't know any better I actually did work at a garden shop for about almost ten years actually so I'm not completely unknowledgeable about this stuff and I planted thousands of packets of seeds and made lots of stuff I made a lot of plans and transferred a lot of plants and do a lot different areas so after you get them plants then they're all you got to do is just cover them up it's as easy as that just cover them up and then pat down a soil you want to get rid of all of the air pockets on there and that's pretty much it for planting your your milkweed seeds it's pretty simple and they should pop up within you know a month to month depending on you know the temperature and everything inside your house so I'm doing this all the way in February February that seems like a really really time to do it yeah but these guys aren't even as front of the ground for about a month let alone grow big enough where I can actually feed enough caterpillars or feed the the caterpillars enough food out of these seeds so that all being said once you're done doing all this I like to try and simulate a greenhouse effect I know if you have some sort of ice to playing around anything will work whether you try and wrap it in plastic and what I like to do cuz I just tossed it in this big plastic bag right here and then I just flip it over and basically I just got my own homemade greenhouse right here that looks so fancy so on mine I've got a couple little holes in here it's not really a big deal you don't need the holes but the plastic bag came with it and I'm like why not really what we're doing here is we're simulating a greenhouse so it's gonna stay a little bit warm on there especially when you got some sunlight coming in and it's gonna keep the humidity up so you don't need to really water these guys as much also it protects it from any sort of other critters that might be running around so I know I used to plant seeds in greenhouses and guess what's guess what lady greenhouses lots of mice so they'll come in and steal all your seeds and everything so you probably don't have to worry about that but just in case you know it's nice to have this little protective barrier so that's pretty much it for growing monarch seeds I actually got my seed this is not I'm not being paid to do this or anything like that but I got my seeds from live monarch calm and they were really really awesome I really like pretty much everything about them they're one of the cheapest places to get the seeds and they gave me billions of season they even had options to like give me more seeds so I thought that was really cool and if you have any extra seeds you know what you can do just go outside just throw them a little place because we need more milkweed you have any questions or anything throw them down the comments down there I promise we'll have a much more butterfly videos in the future and hopefully flaunt and caterpillars pretty soon thanks for watching and have a super-duper delicious day