I have grown the native milkweed Asclepias Fascicularis from seed with the help of a local wholesale nursery. I have given all of the plants away to friends and neighbors. Many of the plants had monarch eggs and/or small caterpillars on the leaves already because I grew the plants next to my own butterfly garden that is very good at attracting Monarchs. I found out that plants with caterpillars really inspired my friends and neighbors to want to learn more about the lifecycle and plight of the Monarch Butterfly. I have been answering many questions about what was happening in their caterpillar’s development that leads up to them metamorphosing into a chrysalis. I have help my friends during their caterpillar’s chrysalis stage teaching them how to give their caterpillar the best possible chance for survival. For instance, it is important not to disturb a newly eclosed (the word for emerging) butterfly for 3 or 4 hours so their wings can fully form and dry. Another thing I did for this project is to get my own butterfly garden designated by the National Wildlife Federation as a Certified Wildlife Habitat, and registered it with The Million Pollinator Garden Challenge. The most exciting news with my project is that my own garden is now an official research site for The Monarch Alert program headed by Dr. Francis Xavier Villablanca at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo! Dr. Villablanca and his research student, Hannah, even came to my house to see my garden when they decided that my butterfly garden would make a good contributor to their research program! We are now all collecting data learned from my garden’s caterpillars and chrysalis’! I have been assisting Hannah, who is doing a research project on backyard butterfly gardens regarding the occurrence of the Tachinid Fly and the OE parasite in butterflies that come from my garden. I have helped her with the collection of 5th instar caterpillars that are brought to her lab to eclose. I have also helped her collect chrysalises that were in my garden. And lastly, I have even assisted in tagging butterflies from my garden so that the research program can better understand where the butterflies go after the leave my garden. We use two different color tags when tagging. We use a blue tag on butterflies that have eclosed in my garden and yellow tags for butterflies who are netted as they fly into my garden. I visited the Monarch Grove State Park and learned from the docents about the lifecycle of the Monarch Butterfly, the Western United State’s key role in the southern migration of the Monarch Butterfly and about the key plants necessary to insure the Monarchs have enough host plants (milkweed) for their eggs and caterpillars and nectar plant sources the traveling Monarchs rely on during their southern and northern migrations. I visited a wholesale nursery in my town that grows milkweed and learned how to successfully germinate my milkweed seeds into plants I can distribute. I purchased 20,000 seeds from a wholesale seed farm and took them to a local wholesale nursery that has offered to help me germinate approximately 300 plants while accepting the balance of my seeds as an additional way to help Monarchs because they can grow more plants than I can. By giving these seeds to the wholesale nursery, it helps the monarchs because native milkweed is extremely hard to grow and because they are experts in growing milkweed, I am hoping their successful growing of milkweed will help make more milkweed available to others in California looking to plant milkweed. I currently have 150 small milkweed plants in my backyard near my own butterfly garden; and have about 300 milkweed plants in the greenhouse at a local wholesale nursery growing.