Karen Stefonick Design

07/30/2026

Your yard's natural mosquito defense:

BATS: 1 bat eats 3,000 mosquitoes per night. You removed the dead tree they roosted in.

DRAGONFLIES: each one catches 95% of prey they chase (including mosquitoes). You filled in the puddle where their larvae developed.

TOADS: 100 mosquitoes per night. You blew away the leaf litter where they lived.

PURPLE MARTINS: colonial aerial insectivores. You never put up a house.

FIREFLY LARVAE: eat mosquito larvae in moist areas. You treated the lawn with grub killer — killed them too.

CHIMNEY SWIFTS: 12,000 flying insects per day. You capped the chimney.

You systematically REMOVED every mosquito predator from your property. Then you wondered why you have mosquitoes. Then you bought a bug zapper (which kills 99.78% BENEFICIAL insects and almost zero mosquitoes). Then you called a spray company (which kills the FEW remaining predators).

You're not fighting mosquitoes. You're BREEDING them. By killing everything that eats them.

Stop spraying. Add a bat house. Build a small pond. Leave the leaves. The predators come back. The mosquitoes go down. Naturally. Like it worked for 300 million years before you showed up.

07/04/2026

Most of our corn and soybeans are GMO, now add this to it. Long term forever chemicals should never be used on crops. Or our gardens.

06/27/2026

06/13/2026

You don't have a yard. You can still feed them. One pot of a native becomes a fuel stop.

You don't need a garden to put a pollinator station on the map. You need one big pot and one native plant. Renters, balconies, a bare concrete patio — all of it works.

Start with anise hyssop. A tough native perennial in the mint family with soft purple flower spikes and licorice-scented leaves. Bumblebees work it nonstop, with hummingbirds and butterflies dropping in.

🌿 The setup:

- Pot at least 12 inches across and deep — she grows a deep root and wants the room.
- Drainage holes. Soggy roots will end it.
- Plain potting mix, no fertilizer. She doesn't want rich living.
- Full sun, water while she settles in, then she handles dry spells on her own.
- Deer and rabbits skip her thanks to the minty oils. Shady rail — mountain mint takes the same treatment.

Cost: one pot, one plant, a bag of soil. That's the whole list.

A single blooming pot, even four floors up, becomes a refueling stop on a route bees and butterflies are already flying — a patch of nectar in a stretch of city that didn't have one before 🌱