The leaf shredder/vac. My husband decided to get a leaf shredder vac for his birthday. Now, instead of shredding all of our leaves the old way (raking into a pile, running over with lawnmower, raking again to place onto beds) we just rake them into a big pile, vac them up, and dump them by the bagful onto our beds. It has saved a ton of time. I only wish I had more leaves!

Making more vegetable gardens. My husband dug up the side yard and we’ve begun amending the soil for next year’s new, large veggie garden. He also built a raised bed for along the back of the house, and will be building another in the spring. We’ve more than doubled our vegetable garden space for next year.

2008 Failures

Tomatoes. My tomatoes were crappy this year. I blame myself. Too little attention was paid to them, both in the seedling phase and beyond.

Morning glories and lemon cucumbers on the fence. I posted about the heartbreak at seeing my plants had been ripped up by my next-door neighbors. It taught me a valuable lesson about not growing anything important on the chain link fence. However, the morning glories had the last laugh, and were back to their twining, blooming selves within a couple of weeks.

Beets. Like the tomatoes, my beets just never took off. Again, I blame myself.

Apples. We had a terrible coddling moth infestation this year, resulting in the loss of over 90% of the Golden Delicious apples from our tree. There is nothing more frustrating than picking a large, perfectly golden apple and seeing that telltale tunneling hole.

There it is, the good and the bad from this past gardening year. All in all, not a terrible year, but it could have been so much better. What were the biggest successes and failures in your garden this year?

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Seed Sources for Frugal Gardeners

If your garden ambitions are larger than your garden budget, starting plants from seed is definitely the way to go. And if your budget still won’t allow for several dollars for one packet of seed, there are several sources to find quality seed at low prices. Here are a few inexpensive seed sources that I’ve come across. I’ve ordered from most of these companies, and I’ve been very happy. The only one on the list that I haven’t ordered from yet is HeirloomVeggieSeeds.com, but members of one of the forums I frequent wrote very highly of the company.

Five Great Sources for Inexpensive Seeds

1. T’s Flowers and ThingsWhile T’s offers a limited selection, I have been pleased with the purchases I’ve made from them, including seed for Sweet Autumn Clematis, Love-in-a-Mist, and several varieties of cosmos. T’s also offers veggie and herb seeds, daylily seeds, and bulbs. All seeds (except daylily seeds) are $1.00 per packet, and you can pay by Paypal or check.


2. Pinetree Garden SeedsThis is probably my favorite source for vegetable seeds. In addition to a wide variety, including several heirloom varieties, I like that you can find a type of vegetable based on the cuisine it is most used in. Most seed packets sell for well under $2.00, and some are under $1.00. If you’re interested in growing gourmet mushrooms, they also have mushroom growing kits. Oh, and they sell flower and houseplant seeds, too.
3. Cheapseeds.comThis is a great source for flower seeds, and especially for large quantities of flower seeds. Most packets of seeds sell for under $3.00 (keep in mind, these are very large quantities–for example, you can purchase 2,500 Sensation cosmos for $2.75!) and you can pay for your order via credit card or Paypal.
4. HeirloomVeggieSeeds.comThis is a different kind of seed company. They sell their heirloom veggie seeds in packages of 50 or 100 packets, varieties selected by the company. This may not suit all gardeners, but if you’re just starting out or you’re open to trying new things, this may be a good way to go. Pricing is very reasonable, with the 100 packet package selling for $49, and the 50 packet package selling for $35–with free shipping. Orders are paid via Paypal.
5. Home Harvest SeedsThis is a very useful source—Home Harvest Seeds sells discounted Ferry Morse seeds at savings of 40% or more per packet. Payment can be made via credit card or Paypal. Another thing I happen to like about this company is that it is owned by another Michigan company, Superior Growers Supply, Inc., of East Lansing. If you’re into supporting our local economy, throw some business their way!

More Inexpensive Options

If you have a Walgreen’s in your area (who doesn’t?) they typically sell their American brand seeds for ten cents per packet in December or January. Watch your sales paper for the coupon.

If you’re interested in exchanging seeds, it may be the most frugal option of all. Here are a few of the seed exchanges that I like:

• GardenWeb Seed Exchange
• WinterSowing Seed Exchange
• In the Garden Online Seed Exchange

So, there you have a selection of my favorite sources for obtaining inexpensive garden seeds. Do you have other sources other than those listed? Share them here!

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Ch-ch-changes….

A new blogging platform. It came with its share of glitches, including stupid Serendipity not allowing any of my former comments to come along with my posts, and I am sure I’m going to take a hit from the almighty Google (I guess I can say goodbye to my search traffic for a while…) but it was worth it. It needed to happen to make way for changes that are coming to In the Garden Online.

The blog can now be just that—my personal garden blog. You’ll notice that the article sections are gone (some people didn’t know they were there in the first place!) That is because the articles are being moved to my new site, which is currently in production. More about that when I’m ready to launch.

If you are a fan of the Seed Exchange, it’s still here, under the same address, www.inthegardenonline.com/seedexchange. I’ll put a badge up here in the sidebar in the next couple of days. There’s still some tweaking to be done, but it should be a smooth ride from here on out. If any of my feed subscribers received old posts over the weekend, I apologize–the feeds went a little wacky when we switched over.

I know we’ll all miss those weird comment error message, session-hash errors (I never did figure out what that was about) and slow page loads, but somehow we will survive. I’m already enjoying one thing that Serendipity didn’t provide: auto-save while I’m writing a post. You have no idea how many posts I lost over on Serendipity….

So, welcome to the new (but still the same ) In the Garden Online. Thanks for making the move with me!

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The Problem With Gardening

I’ve been reading Allan Armitage and Joe Lamp’l’s takes on the state of gardening. In his post, “Gardening is a Four-Letter Word,” Armitage reflects on how often he hears that “gardening is dead,” that style matters more than substance, that the younger generations who are now at the center of marketing campaigns are just not interested in plants, but, instead, want a plant, any plant, to do a particular job in the landscape. He remarks that “trouble is brewing,” and he’s right.

Joe Lamp’l responded to Armitage by correctly reflecting on the state of gardening on television: good shows can’t get the funding, can’t get the sponsors to keep them afloat. Networks want makeover shows with young, hip hosts who may or may not know anything about gardening. Newspapers are cutting home and garden coverage so heavily that you’re lucky to find a garden column in your local paper. I know my paper of choice, the Detroit Free Press, bought out its garden columnist and hasn’t replaced her.

What these two insights from garden/media pros have shown me is simply this: we need to change the way we do things. Gardening is not dead; it simply needs to be brought into the 21st century.

Where We’ve Gone Wrong

Let’s think about this. The problem is reaching younger consumers—those first-time homeowners and young professionals who just don’t seem interested in gardening. What we do know about these younger consumers is that they tend to be high achievers; they’re better educated than preceding generations, and they are generally described as “over-scheduled”: read, busy. Great, so this just reaffirms what we already know, they don’t have time to garden. But one other characteristic of Gen-Y that seems to get overlooked is this: they are “exceptionally tech-savvy.”

Guess where we find them: on the web. These are the Twitterers, the You-Tubers, the Digg-ers, the Crackberry addicts. Yet, what do we have on the web to offer them? Garden blogs (which, while great, are hardly big enough or flashy enough to reach many of them), a handful of really good garden-related web sites, and a whole lot of badly-designed, badly-written garbage that passes as gardening advice. Um—no wonder they’re turned off to “gardening”?

So why are we worrying about newspapers and television when our target is on the web? It’s because that’s what we’re used to, it’s the way it’s always been done.

A Different Way

Let’s change direction for a moment and look at a couple examples of failed television concepts that became web successes, thanks to the ability to reach this demographic.

Consider Leo Laporte and his online technology network TwiT.tv. Way back when, in the mid to late nineties, Laporte had a few shows on cable. The channel went through a series of transitions, starting out as Zdnet, then TechTV, and now, G4. Somewhere along the line, the powers that be decided that no one wanted to watch some forty-something guy (no matter how congenial he was) tell us how to use technology better. His shows were discontinued. So what did he do? He started doing podcasts, and he grew from a couple of small podcasts to a virtual network of shows. He makes a living at it, too. Colleague Kevin Rose (of Digg fame) also has an online network that shows video podcasts, Revision 3.

Consider an example that is closer to our own situation. Unless your name is Norm, it’s unlikely that anyone will sponsor your woodworking show on television. Yet there are plenty of woodworkers out there looking for instruction, community, and inspiration. Enter Marc Spagnuolo, the Wood Whisperer, who had a singular dream of working full-time as a woodworker, yet couldn’t get by on the sporadic pay. He started a small video podcast about woodworking in 2006, and his life hasn’t been the same since. He makes his living full-time by putting together his podcast and working on the related website and blog. He is sponsored by some of the biggest names in woodworking, including Rockler, Festool, and Powermatic. He’s managed to reach a wide audience, including plenty of those pesky Gen-Yers, simply by meeting them where they live.

What This Tells Us

We need to take a step or ten out of our comfort zone. We need to realize that, for our purposes, newspapers and television are dead. And do you know why? Because at their heart, TV and the papers must cater to the lowest common denominator to survive. Is there any other explanation for why there are so many reality shows on television, yet you can’t find a decent show about horticulture to save your life? Why does every paper I’ve ever read have a gossip section, but not a column about gardening? But the web–the web is never-ending, and there is a place in it for all of us. We might have to give up the comfort of high-production-value shows at first, and I can tell you for sure that we’d have to start a show without sponsorships—they’d come later, after we show them some real numbers, after we prove that we’ve reached Gen-Y on their home turf.

85% of people polled still claim to garden at some level—much higher numbers of aficionados than either technology or woodworking are able to claim. If they can reach their audience, and get those necessary sponsorships, then we can, too. We simply have to leave behind our newspapers, our reliance on television, and the perceived domain of little old ladies in straw hats. It is time to enter the 21st century. If we can’t do that, we have only ourselves to blame for the waning interest in gardening among our younger peers.

Sunday: What we are doing so far, and why it’s not enough.

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Wordy Wednesday–On Finding the Time

It’s possibly the biggest obstacle to following your dreams of writing that novel, or submitting that article, or working on your dream of writing poetry: “I don’t have the time.”

“Maybe after I’m retired.”

“Maybe after the kids are all in school.”

“Maybe when I’m finished with my degree.”

“Maybe…..”

The problem with maybes is that they are just another form of excuses, wrapped up in the guise of rationality and reality. No one has the time for writing. No one. Writing is like anything else that’s worthwhile; you must make the time to do it.

Stephen King certainly didn’t have the time to write when he was starting out. He wrote in the laundry room of the trailer he and his wife lived in while working at a laundry and finishing his degree. He snuck in minutes and hours to write even though he was dead tired. He made it work.

J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book by letting her infant daughter fall asleep in the stroller during a walk and quickly ducking into a coffee shop to scribble as much as she could before the baby woke.

Steve could have easily said “forget it—I want to relax!” Jo Rowling had every right to say “I haven’t slept in a week–I’m going home to take a nap while she sleeps!” But they didn’t. They sat, and they wrote, because they had to—because something inside burned more fiercely than the need for sleep, or free time, or whatever else they could have been doing at the time.

When you want to write, you make the time.

Michigan-based novelist Loren D. Estleman wrote a book a while back titled Writing the Popular Novel. In the chapter in which he advises about developing a writing routine and finding a place to write, he wrote this:

“…hours are made of minutes strung together, and in the end no one can tell if they came all in a lump or piece by piece over the course of a year.”

I had this taped above my computer for a long time, and it still runs through my head when I start whining that I don’t have time to write something I’ve been meaning to write. No one is saying that you have to block off four hours a day in which to write—I can’t think of anyone who can manage that. But can you devote fifteen minutes to it? Can you give it a half hour while you’re eating lunch at your desk? Can you scribble that novel out in longhand while you wait for the kids to finish up with hockey practice or ballet rehearsal? Can you get up a half-hour earlier? Can you go to sleep a half-hour later?

If the answer is no, then you don’t really want to write. It’s that simple.

So, what are you going to do, today, to work toward getting started on that novel/poem/article/book proposal? You can do it. If someone like me, who has very little willpower and zero time to go to the bathroom let alone write articles/blogs/books can manage to fit it in, you can, too. I know you can.

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