How I became a garden blogger
By Elizabeth Licata

Garden Rant
Garden Rant.
(Amy Stewart, Michele Owens, Susan Harris).
What started out as a faintly pursued whim a little over a year ago has since become a gardening-related occupation almost as important as the act of gardening itself.

In April, 2005, I was looking for a way to digitally document everything I was doing in my garden—to keep track of what I was planting, when, and how it thrived (or not). There was a website called Dave’s Garden that had an interactive “gardening journal” option, but it seemed not too user-friendly and with little space for commentary. At the same time, I was paying increasingly more attention to the blogging phenomenon, particularly such local sites as Buffalo Rising and Buffalo Pundit. True, these had nothing to do with gardening, but the software they both used seemed easy and universally accessible. Indeed, Spree Associate Editor Ron Ehmke was making use of it to document his own obsession with Brazilian music (ronmusic.blogspot.com).

Garden Blogs
Gardening While Intoxicated.
(Elizabeth Licata).
Sign of the Shovel.
(Michele Owens).
It turned out that setting up a Blogger web log was ridiculously easy, and my garden blog was quickly born. At first, I posted every two weeks or so, then I stepped up the frequency as the summer progressed and Buffalo Garden Walk drew nigh. And of course the nature of the posts became ever more conversational, opinionated and much, much less focused on how my garden was doing, what I was planting, or what I planned for the garden. You would be hard pressed to get a terribly coherent idea of the overall look or feel of my space from my blog (though I have posted lots of nice pictures of tulips and lilies). Increasingly, my posts have become dedicated to critiques of gazing balls and un-PC tirades against native plants and “natural” gardening.

At first I had about five readers. But over a year, that’s grown, and even better, the number of garden bloggers has grown, so much so that there is now a website that collects daily excerpts from garden blogs: voices.gardenweb.com. Through the Voices site, I’ve become a regular visitor to such blogs as Garden Rant, Sign of the Shovel, Dirt, and Takoma Gardener.

I must be clear, though. If you want to learn about gardening, get some local advice and read a few books. If you want to have fun reading about other people’s mistakes, looking at pretty pictures, or participating in the burning gardening controversies of the day (yes, they exist), then read garden blogs. In other words, garden blogs, like most other blogs, do not offer much in the way of factual information; they’re mostly for entertainment.

1-2-3 Go Gardens
1-2-3 Go Gardens.
When the leaves have all fallen and even looking at the garden has become too depressing, turn to the garden blogosphere. For Buffalonians, it might be the only ground worth cultivating in the cold months ahead.




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