If you’ve noticed fewer and fewer gardening stories here and more totally off-topic stories – about fitness and music – that’s no coincidence. That’s just a preview of where this blog is going.
See, I’ve been blogging about gardening for 5 and a half years now. And currently I cover gardening on GardenRant and two garden-center blogs – totaling 5-8 posts every single week. That’s more than enough from me on the subject of gardening, which is why I haven’t been updating here very often.
Subjects that DO interest me include:
- Fitness for the aging gardener (or any boomer who wants to stay active).
- Music and podcasts that my peers and I actually listen to – on iPods and other MP3 players (so, excluding what happens to be on the radio). I’ll be featuring the music actually listened to by people I know.
- Movies and TV that my peers and I enjoy, and movies and TV that we don’t.
- Technology for the tech-averse of a certain age, like me. That includes MP3 players, digital photography, super-easy videos, for starters.
- Social media for fun or career advancement. How to do only the stuff you enjoy.
- Second careers, like mine as a corporate blogger. Includes issues of working part-time from home.
- Gardening - because as soon as it warms up I’ll be out there every day.
I was chatting with my garden designer friend Susan Morrison about all this and with her background in marketing, she quickly summed this all up as “Boomer lifestyle” topics, so I’m using that as a shorthand description of my next “new” blog – really an old one redesigned and redirected.
From Takoma Gardener to… Gardener Susan
I first gave this blog the super-modest, super-local name of Takoma Gardener – because I live in a town called Takoma Park. Too local.
Next, I created my “Sustainable Gardening” website of longer articles to help my garden-coaching clients, and decided to attach this blog to it as part of a package that might, just might, attract enough sponsors to be a real income stream. That explains the current blog title, but notice any sponsor ads in the sidebar? They’re gone – there weren’t enough sponsors and I didn’t really enjoy pursuing them. I enjoyed even less the MAD pursuit of traffic required to attract and keep sponsors.
So this week my fabulous designer/developer (Julia Holland) will be updating this blog to reflect its new subject matter, and the new name will be either Gardener Susan or Gardener Susan’s Blog, with a tagline and maybe some graphics that indicate the topics covered. “Gardener Susan” is my Twitter name and it’s more distinctive than “Susan Harris” (ugh). So, I’m not abandoning my persona as a gardener, but trying to free myself from the strictures of writing about nothing else. (Time to silence the commenter who complains “What does this have to do with gardening?)
I’m already having fun exploring this new world of boomer blogs, starting with thinking up a juicy guest post for Boomer Cafe.
I try to keep my whining about back-the-scenes IT problems to a minimum but can I just say it’s been three weeks since I’ve been able to publish a new post, or even upload a frigging 
photo! Finally, that’s all behind us – fingers crossed. This blog and website are safely hosted by a new company (Hostgator) and ready for action!
What’s Happened in 3 Weeks?
- My Lawn Reform buddies and I have been busy. We were mentioned in a wonderful article by Adrian Higgins for the Washington Post, which is now showing up across the country thanks to syndication. We’ve also acquired three new members – details coming soon. And our new Facebook page is jumping with action!
- I was one of 70-some gardenbloggers shown a fabulous, fabulous time at our meet-up in Buffalo, about which there are dozens of blog posts compiled right here. I have to admit it was downright discouraging to see how many of my fellow gardenbloggers are better photographers than I am.
- This gardenblogger got the opportunity to talk about garden-center blogging at a DC-based marketing salon, hopefully reaching a larger audience about the wonders of blogging and networking by local businesses.
- And my team’s video about a new civic center was shown at a local documentary film festival. Two media events in one week? Yeah, bring it on.
- Just today a bunch of garden writers are calling out Scotts MiracleGro for possible (wink) hypocrisy on the subject of sustainability. Please weigh in while we’re awaiting their promised response.
Coming up soon
- Photos of the gardens of Bethany, Maryland. Low-maintenance, beachy gardens.
- Reporting from the Independent Garden Center Show in Chicago. They’ve graciously invited all four GardenRanters to talk – about the whole “green” thing. We have no shortage of opinions to offer them.
- In early September, reports from the national conference of the American Society of Landscape Architects being held right here in D.C. I promise to find THE most interesting stuff to tell you about.
- Possibly, photos of great gardens in New England…if I can stand to leave the two babies in my family long enough to make the trip. (Jerry and Harry below, keeping me company as I write this very post). The trip would include the garden of Layanee DeMerchant and Blithewold in Rhode Island, the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, and who-knows-what out on Cape Code and Martha’s Vineyard. It’ll be heavenly there in early September, right?
They’re back – the gardenblogging awards nicknamed Mousies – and the “Nominate me!” campaigns have begun. So I’ll add my 2 cents and encourage you to nominate:
- This blog for Best Urban Gardening Blog.
- For Best Writing, GardenRant.
- And for Best Company blog, the Homestead Gardens Blog. Even being named a finalist will get the attention of other independent garden centers and encourage them to start blogs that’ll educate and inspire customers and create community – something that the Lowe’s national gardening blog can never do.
Click here to submit your nominations.
I sure HOPE you notice the biggest change here – the simpler and to-my-eyes much prettier design by Julia Holland. The design covers both my old blog and my two-year-old website coz the website (static pages) has been moved to WordPress where I can fuss with it much more easily than I ever did using Dreamweaver templates (ugh!), which are so outdated it’s hard to find people to help with them anymore.
Financial News
And while Julia and I tried to find the perfect, unobtrusive ways to display sponsor logos, I started losing faith in the whole sponsor idea altogether, and decided to discontinue the practice. The scheme just wasn’t bringing in enough money to justify the effort, especially the effort to have enough traffic to impress sponsors. Don’t worry; I won’t be junking up the place with Google ads – they’re also too much trouble (and reader annoyance) for so little income. So now the graphics in the sidebar are all unpaid-for – yay!
(Damn, what am I saying? It’s not like I have a fat pension or health insurance paid for by someone else.)
But (finally) I have regular income from garden writing – for garden centers – and have even felt secure enough to – wait for it, family members who’ve expressed concern for the state of my home – hire a maid! Yeah, I can hardly believe it either. Ditto hiring someone to move 7 cubic yards of mulch for me (more on that soon). And even went to the Healthy Back Store and brought home an expensive but super-comfortable chair because hell, I’m worth it! Oh, yeah, I’m living the high life here.
What’s missing on Ye Olde Website
PHOTOS! I won’t bore you with HOW it happened but dozens of photos were lost in the move. They’ll be found and replaced when I get around to it, frankly. (I need a break from website-fiddling).
But on a happier note, with no sponsors I see no need to continue my monthly newsletters, which took 6-7 hours to create, test and send. Anyway, lots of short news items that I used to save up for the newsletter are now being Tweeted relatively quickly, and that seems like just the right place to use them.
Speaking of Social Networking
Figuring out how to use Twitter is a challenge, though. Sure, everyone says you absolutely have to Tweet if you expect any career success, ever (yes, almost that dire a command) but what to do if you really don’t enjoy it? I’m taking a cue from the journalists I follow and Tweeting mainly substantive, on-topic links. That’ll just have to suffice.
I love Facebook, though, and credit it with all sorts of reunions with college boyfriends and just this week, a friend from kindergarten I hadn’t seen since the ’70s. Also, people don’t update nearly as often on Facebook (thank you!) and the updates aren’t jam-packed with symbols and abbreviations (#@RT; need I go on?) And it seems tailor-made for following my Left-Coast relatives and friends I like to hear from occasionally, just occasionally.
If you’ve found your way here via AgelessNorthShore’s recommended 14 Blogs 4 U, I invite you to look around. You’ll see from the categories that I cover not just what’s happening in my garden but news in the eco-gardening world and whatever I’m up to at the moment. Usually it’s organizing for good causes and no money (see graphics in sidebar) but finally, it’s for pay! Just launched this week is Garden Center Blogger, where my partners and I help independent garden centers communicate online successfully, and get the very best local gardenbloggers hired in the bargain!
It’s all part of what I used to call My So-Called Second Career, in which I tried to cobble together a living as a garden writer. (For my first 30 years after college I worked as a “court” reporter in Congress and the courts of D.C., when I wasn’t doing stints at a string of nonprofits that started with Common Cause.) Finally after attempting what seems like dozens of possible revenue channels, it’s looking like using my blogging experience to help companies in my industry succeed might just be the perfect fit. To clarify, helping companies that I really WANT to succeed. So even to a ’60s activist, it doesn’t feel like selling out to corporate America or whatever nightmare vision used to haunt us.
But back to Ageless North Shore – I THANK them for including me and I feel honored! I’m also a fan of Time Goes By, whose list of “elderbloggers” the folks at Ageless North Shore perused to find their favorites. Ronni Bennett does an awesome job and I’ve enjoyed contributing a couple of movie reviews to Time Goes By.
Related posts, including a couple on the team blog GardenRant, include:
Indie Garden Centers, Start Your Blogs
Garden Center Blogger Wants You
Memories of Working with Senator Kennedy
How Joe Biden Treats the Help
In Which my Secret Day Job is Revealed
Gardenbloggers may not be in it for the money – hope not! – but we happily lap up any smidgen of recognition that may come our way, so thanks, y’all! Now winning for Best Organic Gardening Blog raises the question of how organics and sustainability are connected, so here’s what they mean to me:
Principles of organic gardening are basic, the very foundation of good gardening. Then sustainabile gardening goes on to pay attention to protecting and improving water and air quality, and providing for wildlife. It even pays attention to the homo sapiens who create gardens and keeping them going. So another area of overlap is with permaculture, also a big-picture approach that includes humans in the equation.
Now excuse me while I peruse the other finalists for ideas. The full results are here.
Next up, GardenRant also won a Blotanical - for Best Design – so thanks again! I’m happy to recommend the folks who created our header – the very cool House of Tears Design in Kansas City, MO. I found them via either eLance or CraigsList – I used both and don’t remember which they responded to.
Oh, and a big thank-you and virtual hug to Stuart Robinson, the wizard behind Blotanical.com and these awards, for his hard work. He’s a true mover and shaker in our little world.
