After gardening for more than 50 years, I enlarged my focus from the pretty plants in my various gardens scattered throughout Davis and Woodland, to the micro-fauna that exist in the miniature worlds I have created, the pollinators, beneficial and not so beneficial insects, and even birds that live out their lives in my backyard, and school gardens. It's not like I never noticed them before, but I had little interest in what they were, and why they were there to begin with.  If they weren't hurting my plants, I ignored them.

In 2018, I took an advanced course in pollinators, as part of my Master Gardener educational training. I visited the local Haagen-Daz Honey Bee Haven Garden at U.C. Davis, and bought and read "California Bees & Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists", which was published by the U.C. Berkeley Urban Bee Lab. Armed with all this new information, I looked at my gardens with totally new eyes, and became captivated by all the various busy lives going about their business among my plants.

Wanting to encourage things along, I created two pollinator gardens, one at Woodland Community College, and another at Woodland High School. My own personal garden had been slowly deteriorating due to time and neglect, so I ripped everything out and replanted with plants known to attract pollinators and beneficials. By 2020, all three gardens were filling in and doing a nice job of attracting a large array of insects and birds. The school gardens provided a living labratory for entomology, biology and plants science instructors, and my own garden provided opportunities to participate in citizen science projects. I decided to start recording the insects seen in the garden, and monitoring the plants for  how much interest pollinators and beneficials showed in them. Eventually I thought this information might be handy for students and anyone else who was interested in creating their own pollinator gardens in Yolo County, so this blog was born.