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According to a study published in the June 2003 issue of “Conservation Biology,” there are 561 known butterfly species in the U.S. and Canada. Not only are these insects beautiful, they’re important pollinators and vital to the health of their natural habitats. You can encourage these gentle creatures to visit your yard by using easy-to-make butterfly food and feeders.

Butterfly Food and Nectar

• Think “rotten” when choosing butterfly food. Butterflies like a variety of food sources, especially over-ripe fruit and rotting vegetation. If you own an apple, plum, cherry or pear tree, allow fallen fruit to ferment on the ground to create a favorite feeding spot. Look in the quick-sale area of your grocer’s produce section, and you might even get the produce manager to donate one or two unsaleable pieces of fruit. Consider saving extra bananas in the freezer, which you can defrost and place in a feeder at any time.

  Make your own butterfly food by mixing a solution of 10 parts water to 1 part granulated sugar (use tablespoons or teaspoons depending on the size of your jar), boiling the mixture until the sugar is dissolved, then letting it cool. Extra solution can be stored in your refrigerator for up to a week. An alternative recipe is to cut up a dozen over-ripe bananas into chunks, add two cans of cheap beer, one or two bottles of molasses, and a pound of brown sugar and let it ferment for about a week. The easiest recipe of all is to save any overripe fruit, add a squirt of honey, blend it coarsely in a blender, then divide the mixture into freezer containers.

Butterfly Feeders

• Take a ceramic or glass pie plate, plastic or terra cotta plant saucer—or any dish with a sloping rim—and suspend the plate with flower pot hangers or a macrame-style holder made from household twine. Decorate around the twine with the stems of silk or plastic flowers to make it visually appealing to butterflies, and hang the feeder from the bough of a shady tree, before adding butterfly food. Replace food if it dries out or becomes moldy. Place brightly colored yellow and orange kitchen scouring pads in the dish with the liquid butterfly food solution. You’ll attract butterflies and give them a resting place while they drink.

  Making a jar feeder. Use any small glass jar that has a tight-fitting lid. Punch a small hole in the lid of the jar using a small nail and a hammer, then cut a portion of a sponge and pull it through the small hole, making sure it fits tightly. Soak the sponge with a sugar-water solution, and fill the jar with the solution as well. Use string to tie around the jar to make a hanger, then hang the jar with the sugar water upside-down so that the butterflies can feed on the juice from the sponge.

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A bizarre bath-mat which is made out of 70 balls of moss held together in a latex frame has gone on sale after a prototype creation became a hit online.

The  ‘Moss Rug’ was created by Nguyen La Chanh over two-years-ago as part of her degree course, but as soon as she uploaded images to the web, she was besieged with requests to buy it.

Since then she has been perfecting the design and finding a firm capable of making the odd item which uses forest moss as a ‘living’ carpet.

Nguyen, from Switzerland, says the idea of having things growing it the bathroom came to her while she was a student… that’s shared bathrooms for you.

Speaking of the design, she said: “The humidity of the bathroom and the drops flowing from the body, water the mosses. This vegetation carpet procures a great feeling to your feet.

“The idea was to a new way of having your plants inside. Not only plants in pots quietly standing in the corner of a living room but alive plants, evolving in the house.”

And in case you want to try promoting your own moss in your yard, here’s a simple recipe that will promote moss growth on stone, brick and the like:

Mix up a batch of 12 oz. beer, 1/2 teaspoon of sugar and a couple of clumps of moss. Paint this mixture thickly on any damp shady surface you’d like to be moss covered and the moss will slowly grow and spread.

How To Build Your Own Moss Bath Mat

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