Larval butterfly garden

When the first signs became clear that we were able to buy the house we are now living in, I started dreaming creating a big butterfly paradise. 
During the first year we only mowed some paths and the rest was free to grow. I ordered some blackthorn and hawthorn to create two hedges for birds and with this order I received, by accident, a lot of young beech plants which I was allowed to keep. As these beeches needed to be plant quickly, I decided to create two gardens. One around the solar panels and one for a future larval butterfly garden.

April 2024: The start of the future larval butterfly garden

In 2024 nothing happened (except mowing) in this part of the garden as a lot of other jobs needed to be done first. In 2025 I made plans for this garden and looked for garden boxes from steel (to keep snails away). As I needed a lot of boxes steel was no option for my budget so I decided to buy 40 used logistic boxes and to treat them with black stain (to protect them against moisture/rain).

For weeks I was busy staining them and once I was ready I started placing them in the larval butterfly garden, filled them a big layer of cardboard and protected the wood with plastic foil.

​The next 'problem' was the amount of soil to fill the boxes as for every box I need 0,3 m3 of soil. We drove to a kind of 'waste' point where everybody from the village can get 1m3 of free soil at a time.  The advantage is that it's free, the disadvantage is that the soil is made of collected garden waste and that it contains a lot of plastic and glass pieces.

The first part of the larval butterfly garden

The first boxes are filled with soil and planted with larval foodplants for some butterfly species alternated with flowering plants.