And that’s not a good thing. It doesn’t mean no malaria, Zika, or dengue which are in fact spreading because of climate change. Insects are the bottom of the food chain. Amphibians, many fish, and birds rely on insects, and predators rely on them. Without insects the food chain collapses.
A study published by Hans de Kroon et al showed it is not just Monarch butterflies or bees that we should be worried about. It is the cumulative impact on all insect populations that impacts the food chain.
These researchers looked at insect populations in 63 German nature preserves over 27 years.
In an interview in The Guardian Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK said “Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline… We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
This should be another call to action for gardeners. We all need to plant native plants and garden without pesticides that kill beneficial insects! Better for our families now, better for the whole planet in the long run.
And we can have beautiful gardens using native plants and no synthetic chemicals! But we all need to start transforming our gardens NOW!
Milkweed is beautiful in our new native garden and brings in lots of bees and butterflies. Above are pictures of a swallowtail, and less pretty but still important, a tussock moth caterpillar.

Since the federal government is walking back what should be common sense protections of or drinking water, we all need to redouble or efforts to do what we can to protect our water quality and educate our neighbors about how important clean water is to our families health.
The EPA is planning to rescind rules designed to protect our drinking water from the discharge of dirty water with contaminants including lead and mercury from coal plants. It is hard to imagine how anyone could think that is good, especially considering “Utilities would need to spend about $480 million on new wastewater treatment systems, resulting in about $500 million in estimated public benefits, such as fewer incidents of cancer and childhood developmental defects,” according to the AP. For those of us who fish, and anyone who eats fish, this is worrisome because these pollutants also wind up in our fish.
With this in mind this fall we can work on amending and protecting our soil so our plants will flourish without synthetic chemicals that would wind up in our drinking water and compound the pollution issues.
Now is the time to put your garden beds to sleep. Remember, don’t leave your soil naked. Either use mulch (around plants in beds) or a cover crop (on raised beds or fields). I like dutch white clover on my raised beds. It fixes nitrogen, and is easy to uproot and turn over the soil. It also tends to pop up in my vegetable garden beds and keep tough weeds out. Fava beans are a cold weather cover crop favorite of mine. They produce well into the late fall and also fix nitrogen. Winter rye, cowpeas, and legume oat seeds are other options.
Other advantages to using a cover crop are they prevent erosion, protect and feed healthy soil bacteria and fungi, and help the soil hold water. This way the soil absorbs heavy rain to prevent flooding and has stored water during dry spells.
In my perennial beds I use mulched leaves. It does a beautiful job and is free. Pesticide free gardens allow good bugs to flourish, like this praying mantis that eats other bugs.

This is a great time of year to take care of your soil so that your garden will flourish in the spring.
I am also able to weed the beds of the new native plant garden now more easily because there are only occasional bees. Up until this week the Heuchera Autumn Bride and the Liatrus were filled with very happy bees. Now it is in the high thirties over night.
First, if you haven’t done it yet, think about aerating your turf. This allows the roots to get oxygen and to spread out. It also provides air to the beneficial microorganisms in the soil that keep your grass healthy. Autumn is the time to do this because in the spring you uncover weed seeds when they are ready to germinate. Now your turf has the upper hand and root growth is strong. If your grass is thick and healthy you will have fewer problems with weeds. You can still overseed, too, to encourage dense turf and outcompete weeds.
Strong soil is the key to plants doing well without chemicals.

Now is a good time to make lists of plants that you love.
My first draft of a list included non-native plants so that I could look for natives with similar structure and color. I also considered things I didn’t the first time we planned gardens at our home, like where the snow falls from the eaves in a big storm is not a good place for a structural plant or evergreen that will get crushed (like boxwood).
Great sources of lists of native plants with pictures and descriptions of the conditions which they need to grow are The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (of which we are an affiliate, and the Missouri Botanical Garden.
It is also a great time to visit friend’s gardens and public gardens to see fall foliage. My Asters, Autumn Bride, and Liatrus are beautiful now.
This is a picture of Asters in my garden with a planted lady butterfly this morning.

If you are planning to plant in the spring now is the time to map where the sun is, because the leaves are about to fall!
This is one of the first things we did in planning our new native garden. If you put plants that like sun in sunny areas and ones that like shade in shady areas, you are giving them the best chance to thrive – without pesticides.
So start early in the morning on a sunny day. Take a simple map of your property, or at least the area you are planning to plant in,and make 10 copies. Go outside each hour and draw lines demarcating where the shade is. Yes, the angle of the sun is different in the spring, summer, and early fall. But it gives you a good idea and a concrete record to help with your planning.
Think about this when you are deciding where to plant trees, too.
We have a woods on the east side of our property, that casts a big shadow early in the morning. Our barn is placed so that it has this shade on the east and more trees shading it on the south. When it is 90 degrees in the summer our tack room is often 65 degrees. None of the trees are up close to the barn, so there is plenty of air circulation, too. In the winter these deciduous trees drop there leaves and the barn is in full sun.

We provide the answer to why it is important to care for your yard without chemicals, and information on how to do that. We also provide the tools to communicate the why to friends and neighbors in your community who share your watershed.
We need you to use these tools to spread the word in your community. Together we can clean up our drinking water and give our families healthier lives.
It is fall, so this is the time to take care of your lawn so that it will look great in the spring. Natural lawn care is all about soil culture!
Use our organic lawn care brochure to learn more and spread the word in your community. Download it here.
Use our mailbox card to start a conversation with your neighbor so they will join you in caring for your lawn to protect your water. Download it here.
And take the Pledge! It’s not a pledge for money, it is a way to quantitate support in your community for Healthy Yards!
It’s good for this song sparrow, and it is good for our children!

If you don’t use pesticides good bugs will thrive and eat the bad bugs! This praying mantis is taking care of my Earthkind Belinda rose. Earthkind roses are strong enough to cultivate with good soil culture and no synthetic pesticides.Look for the Earthkind designation when you are choosing roses for this coming spring.
To praying mantises all bugs are good bugs – for their dinner. Mantises are beneficial, but eat bees and other beneficial insects as well as aphids, mosquitoes, flies, and beetles. Overall they are a big plus. They mate in the fall and lay egg cases that overwinter, with baby mantises hatching in the spring.

Monarch on liatrus_9_17I am seeing fewer and fewer Monarch butterflies in my native garden now that fall is coming. This is good, because they should be headed down to Mexico where they winter. But with the warm weather a few are lingering. They are no longer interested in the milkweed which has gone to seed. Instead they are all over the liatrus.
These amazing butterflies migrate each year from Canada to Mexico. Their population is measured by the number of acres of forest they cover in Mexico during the winter. They covered 45 acres of forest at their peak 20 years ago, but were down to only about three acres just a couple of years about. That is a 93 percent decline. Last year they increased to ten acres as gardeners, farmers, and communities added milkweed.
What we do is helping, and hopefully that will galvanize gardeners to work harder to support our native birds and insects that are struggling from climate change and development by planting native plants and not using pesticides.

Our first step was to choose a landscape architect. I wanted to work with someone whose gardens moved me and who had lots of experience in planning native gardens. I chose Sheila Brady, a principal at Oehme Van Sweden and a leader in sustainable design. Her work includes the Native Garden and the Azalea Garden at the New York Botanical Garden. At the corporate headquarters of United Therapeutics she designed a central plaza and three floors of green roofs, and she designed the Lakeside Gardens at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Fortunately Sheila also loves to do residential work and was willing to work with us.
Since our budget was limited, we decided to concentrate initially on one area. Together my husband and I and Sheila decided that the entrance to the property and the front of the house was a good place to begin. Blair was delighted, and hoping that implementing the plan would require him to purchase new machinery, his favorite part of gardening.
This picture is the Green Velvet boxwood on either side of the front walk soon after I planted them. They grew to 3 feet high over the years.

While something as big as the Mississippi River or other rivers or waterways near our homes seems beyond the scope of our ability to make an impact, the opposite is true. Non point source pollution is the result of many small contributions to a large pollution problem. Together what we do in our yards matters tremendously. Most of the land in the US is residential, homes and small parks, schools, and churches, where the neighborhoods decide how the soil and gardens are cared for. Each year Americans use over 80 million pounds of pesticides on our yards and gardens that wash into our drinking water, and we don’t need to.
Gardening to protect water quality means gardening without pesticides and using lots of native plants is the best way to do this.
I am a mom and a doctor, so protecting water quality is really important to me. I am a lifelong gardener who had an organic farm for fifteen years on the banks of a trout river. I care about gardens, and I know many practical ways to avoid pest problems or deal with these problems organically. Speaking to groups around the country I have found the biggest obstacle to adopting pesticide free care is that people are concerned that their yards will not look good without chemicals. Making changes to our garden plans and deciding how to add native plants was daunting to me. Along with many of my friends and fellow gardeners I had added some milkweed and some native plants, but needed help with an overall plan to make a big impact.
So I got help from an amazing landscape architect. Follow along to see how we are starting to change our landscape to more and more native plants, and yet making it more beautiful than it was before when it was comprised largely of traditional non-native plants.
We are doing this on a budget, so it is a phased plan. Moreover, while I now have some help in the garden, my husband and I do most of the yard work on our property so it has to be manageable and enjoyable to maintain. I am a member of Bedford Garden Club, so I am sharing the knowledge I have gotten with my friends and neighbors as I go and benefiting from their experience, too.
Join us on this garden adventure.
This is a great time to start planning for Spring planting!
Above is an early “before” picture showing some of our foundation plants (the Kousa dogwood, rhododendron, scotch broom, and boxwood, are all visible). We built our home over 20 years ago. We were fortunate to have a spectacular architect who worked for a renown firm known for their landscape architecture.
The entrance to the house was flanked by two large boxwoods and the path was flanked by a hedge of smaller boxwoods. The two large Buxus Sempervirens had grown to be taller than I am, full and beautiful. However, in heavy snow falls they suffered. We just did not have the patience to cover them in burlap every winter, and even the few times we did they took hits with heavy snow falling off the steeply pitched roof. And running outside to clean off all of the many boxwood that I had planted on the property got old quickly. We used Green Velvet boxwood, a cultivar that only grows to 3′ by 3′ to flank the path. In addition to snow damage rabbits were very fond of them, and they grew raggedy over time. Boxwood leaf miners occasionally attacked, too. Buxus Sempervirens is native to Southern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa. Buxus Green Velvet is from Europe, Asia, Africa and Central America. We also had a hedge of Buxus Sempervirens on the side of the driveway with an opening to walk or drive through.
On either side of the front door were groupings of Chionoides Rhododendron. A traditional and beautiful foundation plant, they have dark green leaves and beautiful white flowers with yellow centers. These are not native so they do not support native insects and birds. Our biggest problem was that in very heavy snow storms the snow falling off the roof would pummel them. Also, while our yard was fenced, if deer managed to get in they would head straight for these plants. We also had a Scotch Broome, but rabbits continually feasted on that so I gave up on it. We had Miss Kim lilacs which are just beautiful, but not native. Blue Girl Holly got quickly decimated during deer incursions and did not recover. We had a Rose of Sharon that was beautiful (also white with a yellow center), and though it was not a native the bees loved it and it grew like a weed. In fact it was so vigorous I could not keep it pruned and we needed to remove it. In front of the library we had Delaware Valley White Azaleas. They were not native, and struggled with cold winters in our zone 5. We initially also had four Cornus Kousa trees, one at each corner of the auto court. We got rid of those after one of our labradors ate the Kousa fruit. He loved it, and would jump in the air to get more from higher branches. But it upset his stomach and I would have to walk him again and again at night.
As you can see, I was ready for a change!