Arizona Herb Association

Excellent summer pollinator plant for Low Desert gardeners. 👇🏼Here is a detailed comparison from Spadefoot Nursery in Tucson, so you do not get mixed up with nasty Puncture Vine and accidentally pull out your Arizona Kaltrops Poppy (Az Summer Poppy). Seeds for this native poppy germinate June-July, and bloom into late fall.
Seed is at some local nurseries or online from Native Seeds/SEARCH one of our Arizona heirloom seed companies.👇🏼👇🏼-mike

https://www.nativeseeds.org/products/wf003?variant=40717798047898

Solid Arizona based information on Milkweeds, from local experts.
-mike

We want to share a note on tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica). Many of you have read things online about how this plant isn’t good for monarchs and are wary of this species. We’re here to tell you, you should be careful, but not for the reasons you read about online. You may have read that it keeps monarchs from migrating south. This is true in the north where all their native milkweeds are deciduous and them going dormant is a sign for the monarch to move on. But we live in a subtropical region near Mexico, and we have several native evergreen species. Monarchs are here in winter, even if they sometimes go into a sort of sleep for a few colder days. You might have heard of the parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE) a protozoan that causes them problems. It’s not as much an issue in our region, because OE prefers wet climates, which we are not.
Tropical milkweed is a near native for us (it can be found near Hermosillo, Sonora). It is a favorite of our monarchs and queens. But you SHOULD be careful where you source them. As far as we know, we are the only nursery in Arizona to completely abstain from pesticides. Many tropical milkweeds found in the market come from giant greenhouse growers that use a lot of pesticides and don’t tolerate aphids. It’s unfortunate because when you walk into a nursery you expect they would feel the same. But most nurseries care more about the sellability of a plant. They want perfect looking plants with no “bugs”. Our milkweeds often have bugs. We allow our plants to look dormant or have aphids. And we are trying to get you to also change your expectations of how a healthy plant should look. Hint: plants that look perfect in the market will probably not look that way when you take them home. Because that plant was made to sell, not succeed. We make plants that are locally grown, without pesticides, and not in a greenhouse, but outside where you’ll also be putting your plants.
We have a total of 8 species of clean-grown Asclepias right now.