Shea Simmons
For many people, a garden is their own personal oasis. If you want to attract butterflies to your outdoor space for an even more Zen-like experience, you only need two basic ingredients.
Adding sand and water can help draw butterflies to your garden, yard, or porch. Planting specific flowers also encourage butterfly visits, but if you’ve already done your planting for the season, no worries—you can try this simple trick any time.
Just as butterflies need the nectar provided by flowers, they also need water, which is why this trick works. They’ll drink water from any vessel, but if you saturate sand with H2O, it’s even more butterfly friendly. When they suck water from sand (a process called puddling), they also get minerals from the sand.
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To try this trick, just grab a cake pan, a shallow dish, or even a colorful platter, and fill it with sand. Then, saturate it with water so the sand is thick but not floating. Place it among your flowers or in the sunlight to provide the butterflies with both water and nutrients.
If you want all the neighborhood butterflies to drop by, you can take it a step further and whip them up some butterfly food.
