I sent you an email. Karyn

I have the orange asclepias tuberosa pods, but why not use as many different kinds as you can. I had the pink swamp milkweed and those caterpillars loved it so much they stripped and ate it to the ground. i had hundreds that year, love providing food for them.

Hello smilieface33: There are a few different online sources that offer milkweed plants for sale. However you need to confirm that they do not use any type of pesticides on the plants that will harm the caterpillars. I have added the link to a nursery that does not use harmful sprays. Good luck. Here is a link that might be useful: Milkweed plants for sale

Almost all seeds are dry, sort of hard, and black or brown when ripe. The pods or flower heads that grow the seeds will turn dry brown or straw-colored, and typically the seeds will be ready to fall out, shake out, float away, etc. This can take a long time - for example I collected butterflyweed seeds last november that were just getting ready to fly. By the way, the wild bergamot is very easy to transplant without really impacting the original plant. At the base of each plant will be small "rummers" (stolons, if you're a botanists) that form new stems in an expanding clump. You can separate a few stems and a couple of stolons (and some soil underneath - use a sharp shovel) from an established clump and transplant. Replace a little soil in the hole you left behind and the original plant will create new growth to replace what you have taken. By transplanting this summer you can have blooming plants nest year. Others such as butterflyweed and blazing start probably won't bloom from seed the first year, but also can't easily be divided or transplanted without destroying the original plant (and bettuerflyweed is really hard to move in my experience). Good Luck.