February 2026

A monarch butterfly sits on a flower.

Many gardeners fill their space with flowers to attract butterflies, but how would you like to have a garden where the complete life cycle takes place? You can grow and raise your own butterflies, from eggs to interesting caterpillars to the beautiful winged creatures. With the right habitat, you can enjoy lepidoptera all season long and even host the same species in your garden year after year.

Marc Armstrong, director of government affairs for Ohio's Electric Cooperatives, appears on TV next to a landscape of a farm.

Electric cooperatives have a long history of providing service where there was an unfilled need. It’s a story that especially resonates with Patrick Gottsch.

In the late 1990s, Gottsch, then a sales executive for a successful livestock auction, looked at cable television lineups around the country and noticed something missing: there was no rural-focused programming anywhere on the dial.

A group of kayakers paddle through a river.

Ohio has a delightful abundance of lakes and rivers to explore, and a kayak is the perfect way to do it. A happy thing about lakes: There are no worries about paddling upstream or needing an extra car and a pickup place downstream. Just relax and enjoy the view, or make it aerobic and paddle hard.

If fishing is your fancy, wet a line and see what’s biting. Like birding or nature watching? Take binoculars and a camera. From your kayak, you can spot that elusive bird flitting in the treetops, get close to the turtles sunning on rocks, and watch the fish swimming beneath you.

An aerial view of the city of Columbus.

A Vietnam veteran was exploring the then newly opened National Veterans Memorial and Museum (NVMM) when he saw another man, a veteran of World War II, and stopped him in his tracks with a “Thank you for your service.”

“It was a very moving moment,” says Shelley Hoffman, associate director of external affairs, who witnessed the scene. The poignant episode epitomizes NVMM’s unique mission: saluting every veteran from every branch of the U.S. military in every period of war and peace.

A photo of a collection of daylilies.

Velvet Eyes and Wild Horses. Strawberry Candy and Pink Bikini. Snow Prince. Moonlit Masquerade. Dreamworld. Baby’s Got Blue Eyes.

Those alluring names are just a few of the thousands — literally thousands — of varieties of daylily. So captivating are these perennial posies, in fact, that Ann Brickner readily admits she is absolutely addicted to them.

Cooperative leaders sit with U.S. Rep. Bob Gibbs

As you might imagine, electric cooperatives have a great story to tell.

We talk about our history, about rural neighbors who banded together to bring electricity to their homes and farms when no one else would.

We talk about the present, about the vital service we provide, and about our involvement in our communities — locally, nationally, and even internationally.

Three men look into the water from a boat near Middle Bass Island.

It’s no secret that Lake Erie’s recent algae blooms have a small army of scientists and conservationists working nonstop to remedy its troubles. But a little-known faction has been feeding valuable data to those problem-solvers: charter captains.

“We first started with the Ohio EPA,” says Dave Spangler, longtime captain and vice president of the Lake Erie Charter Boat Association (LECBA). The EPA, he says, sent lab technicians wading near shore to collect samples. “The better part of the Western Basin just wasn’t getting covered,” he says.

A couple and their dog look at the forest from a cliff.

Guernsey-Muskingum Electric Cooperative (GMEC) serves 17,091 consumer-members in east-central Ohio. The unglaciated terrain doesn’t lend itself to wide swaths of farmland, but the hills make for fine pasturelands for cattle raising, and poultry barns fit nicely in the valleys. Because it’s situated in the midst of the Utica Shale, the oil and gas industry is a strong economic driver for the region.