Nature Is My Therapy

My garden is meant to be welcoming to wildlife. That’s why I’m growing so many native plants, and why I built a natural pond last year. I want bugs to eat my plants, and I care a lot about ma...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2024/05/12/the-irony-of-fighting-wildlife-in-my-wildlife-garden/

May is always the most exciting month of the year here in northwest Ohio, and things are really happening now. More flowers are blooming, there’s more variety in insects, and bird migration is ...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2024/05/04/its-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year/

Since my garden is always a work-in-progress (aren’t they all?), I like to show you how it’s changing from time to time as I continue my native gardening journey. It’s still very early in o...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2024/04/13/garden-check-in-april-2024/

BEFORE: Unless you’ve had your head in the sand for a while, you witnessed the intense media coverage leading up to the total eclipse of the sun on April 8. Here are examples of some of the hea...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2024/04/08/my-eclipse-experience-before-and-after/

On March 19, 2024, I gave a talk for the Oak Openings Region Chapter of Wild Ones, which happens to be my local chapter in northwest Ohio. This was my title slide: I’d been inspired by a talk p...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2024/03/26/discover-the-joy-of-insects-in-your-native-garden/

One of my friends runs a nature book group at our local library and I enjoy participating occasionally. For February we read Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty, and I absolutely loved i...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2024/03/21/diary-of-a-young-naturalist/

If you’ve been a subscriber to this blog for a while, you’ve read about my involvement with native plant sales through Wild Ones. Every year we have a big sale in May, and that sale has conti...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2023/10/11/volunteering-teaching-everyone-wins/

Wow, where have I been?! It’s been almost two months since I posted here…what’s going on with me? This post will be a jumble of topics, mostly because that’s what my mind consists of thes...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2023/10/01/early-fall-hodgepodge/

I didn’t purposely plant swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) beside my air conditioner, but it decided to show up there this year anyway. And I’ve relished having it so close to the sunroom ...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2023/08/09/swamp-milkweed-not-just-for-monarchs/

When I began converting my garden to mostly native plants in 2017, I started a project on iNaturalist called “My Toledo Yard Biodiversity,” in which I recorded every insect I was able to phot...

https://natureismytherapy.com/2023/07/08/citizen-science-in-action-at-home/