SALISBURY — Judy Klusman may be well known as a member of the Rowan County Board of Commissioners, but to her neighbors she is also the person who grows an organic garden with a jungle of plants instead of a grassy front yard. Part of her garden includes a patch of milkweed, which Klusman planted in an effort to attract monarch butterflies to her front porch.

The butterflies are on their way down the coast to Mexico now, where they will spend a winter in the forests and hills between the states of Michoacan and Estado de Mexico. After the winter, the butterflies will migrate back to the northern United States and Canada. There the butterflies will stay for the summer before starting the trip south all over again.

Monarch butterflies make three or four stops to lay eggs. Those eggs will hatch the next generation of butterflies who will continue the journey south. For the past six years, Klusman’s patch of milkweeds is one of the stops where the next generation of butterflies starts their journey to Mexico.

The fact that her garden is entirely organic also contributes to the butterflies laying their eggs and then hatching in her yard. If she used pesticides or other chemicals on her plants, especially the milkweed, Klusman said that the chemicals would harm or kill the butterflies before they had a chance to lay the eggs.

Once the butterflies stop on her milkweed plants, Klusman clips the stalks and places them in an outdoor house for the chrysalises that the butterflies will hatch out of. There, the 45 butterflies that have made their cocoons are safe from the wasps that Klusman say will kill the caterpillars if they are left in the open.

“The first year I planted the milkweed I didn’t do anything about protecting them. And what happened was, I learned there’s a wasp that likes to lay their eggs inside the caterpillar, and I found one poor caterpillar like that, and I’m like, ‘Oh no,’ so that’s when my friend Jess introduced me to the butterfly house,” said Klusman.

Now, Klusman is hoping that Salisbury could become one of the East Coast communities that takes steps to provide a larger stop for the monarch butterflies.

“Back home in Wisconsin, I grew up on a farm. Our property was very flat, and we had deep ditches and they were just full of milkweed. As farmers got more and more weed killer, ours started to go, we just don’t really have any milkweed anymore. So that’s why we really need to do it in this city,” said Klusman.

According to the National Wildlife Federation, the population of monarch butterflies in the world has gone through a decline of 90 percent over the past decade. That sharp decrease in population comes from the loss of habitats and native plants that Klusman said happened on her family’s farm in Wisconsin.

Klusman said her organic garden has become so well established on her property that she began to give away plants to anyone from the neighborhood who wanted any the past few years. Originally she gave plants away for several Saturdays in a row, but she had to cut that down to only once in the fall and once in the spring because she was getting so many people coming to her garden hoping for plants.

Klusman joked that she was sure some of her neighbors did not like her organic garden because it was not a manicured lawn, but she did not worry about that because she had not heard any complaints.

“I have quite a few neighbors that come by and they just think it’s great, so I listen to them and nobody else,” said Klusman.

Klusman said that anyone interested in joining her in making Salisbury a destination for monarch butterflies can contact her for more information at judith.klusman@gmail.com.

Klusman expects both the garden and the butterflies to change in the coming week. The garden will get a minor change, as she plans to plants yellow mums to prepare for OctoberTour in Salisbury. The butterflies themselves will be hatching within the next two weeks, at which point the next generation of monarchs will begin their journey south to Mexico.