Garden Rant

How to use gardenblogs and bloggers to promote your business

The subject of businesses advertising on and promoting their products on gardenblogs has caused quite a stir lately - starting here on Trey Pritsenberger's blog.  In 130 comments there and further on a Facebook page for gardenwriters, these connections were debated:

• Bloggers now writing for Troy-bilt - the Saturday Six you see advertised in our sidebar.  Trey objects because it isn't just Troy-bilt but also Lowes that the Six are promoting.  And independent garden centers, like Trey's, really feel the heat from the Boxes.
• P. Allen Smith and his sponsors paid air fare and lodging for 24 gardenbloggers over a weekend in April - here are the details.  Lots of discussion in the comments covered whether the bloggers are adequately disclosing the freebie nature of the trip when they write about it or the products they heard about that weekend.  The FTC rules were invoked.
• And Trey started his post by mentioning advertising on blogs - like the ones here on the Rant.  Just to clarify (and not to join the catfight), I posted a comment explaining that Blogads are set up and paid for automatically, without blogger involvement. (Which I've since found out is incorrect.  I'm not the contact person and didn't realize that bloggers DO get advance notice before ads appear.  My bad!)

No need to rehash all that, but can we brainstorm/discuss civilly how companies can best connect with gardenbloggers?  I'll start.

Hire a blogger

This is, of course, my first choice and I've been blogging for independent garden centers for a couple of years now.  (Currently here and here.)  Magazines have hired experienced bloggers (Fine Gardening, Horticulture, as have the aforementioned Troy-bilt and Lowes.  (Come on, local garden centers, do you want the Boxes to beat you at building customer loyalty?)

Would I blog for just any company?  Definitely not, and I know that Scotts Miracle-Gro will be disappointed to hear I'm not available.  (Smirk).  But gardenwriters struggle to pay their bills and if a company doesn't hire a blogger, they'll probably hire a PR and marketing firm, paying more for a blog that fails to connect with their customers or the blogging community. Back in 2008 Amy wrote: "You Probably Don't Need a Marketing Company To Get You Blog Exposure, Period" and that's only become more evident in the three years since then.

And just recently there are some new reasons for local companies to blog (posting valuable content, not just marketing) with the opportunities to republish their blog posts on Patch and other micro-local news websites. 

Advertise on blogs

We're seeing a slow but steady increase in advertising on blogs - finally!  I encourage all you hard-working gardenbloggers out there to set up a Blogads account and display it prominently.

Send products for bloggers to try out and review

Sure, send us your products to write about, but I like the offers that come initially by email with the opportunity to opt-out - to reduce my growing cache of stuff I'll never use and can't figure out how to get rid of.  And I probably won't review plants if they didn't grow well for me, gadgets that don't work, and books I didn't like.  I DO feel obligated to mention the source of plants if and when I mention a freebie.

As to whether we need to reveal the free nature of every plant and book we receive, there doesn't seem to be consensus opinion on this.  Many have suggested that it's understood that book reviewers didn't buy the book, and I agree.  For plants, tools, et cetera it's probably necessary.

Your turn

Bloggers, what do you think?  Companies marketing to or through bloggers, what have you tried and how well did it work for you?

Flowers do not disappoint

The ability to finally garden has been front page news here in Buffalo and the national news is taking notice of the (delayed) gardening season in articles like this one in the Wall Street Journal: "Cities Invite Tourists to Stop and Smell the Roses". 

It reports on the phenomenon that Garden Walk Buffalo represents in cities across the U.S. Inspired by Buffalo’s, Cleveland is now holding a city-wide garden walk that will include urban farms, vineyards, and orchards—the first one is June 24—and there are many established walks and festivals: lilacs in Rochester; azalea in Wilmington, NC; and lupines in Maine, among countless others.

Last year,  Connecticut geography professor Richard Benfield was in Buffalo researching his upcoming book Garden Tourism. The 16-year-old Buffalo event, which—starting last year—has now grown into a five-week festival including on-going open gardens, a front yard contest, and a speaker/seminar program, now draws 25% of its visitors from out of town. (Keep in mind that the first GWB had 20 gardens and was more like a block party than a tourist event.) Also, the GWB visitors attend an average of 3.39 garden events per year, leaving money behind at each.

The Journal interviewed GWB prez Jim Charlier as well as Benfield, and concluded with the statement I quote in this post title.

Garden Walk visitors will never see my viburnum during this, its finest season. By itself, it’s a fine example of plicatum tomentosum—which is all very well—but the way it embraces this sculpture makes it a real event. It does not disappoint.

Happy Memorial Day!

Showy

I have two tree peonies in the front of my house.  I often wonder why.

The blooms last about four days out of the year.  They are ruined by both rain and sun.  The plants take up a lot of space for such a limited show.

One of them is sending up an herbaceous sucker that I have to get rid of, undoubtedly because I was too lazy to saw out a tree root in order to plant it properly deeply.  The peony story here from the Royal Horticultural Society's Plantsman magazine offers a superbly clear explanation of why tree peonies are grafted onto the roots of herbaceous peonies.

Tree peonies are expensive.  White Flower Farm, whose photos of tree peonies have been making me swoon for the entire 20 years I've been gardening, charges $89.00 apiece for them. The ones I have are relatively cheap plants I paid about $20 apiece for.  They were labeled 'magenta' rather than any variety name. 

My tree peonies have frustrated me by being so much shorter than their reported height of 4 or 5 feet.  However, the one pictured above, which has been in the ground four or five years now, suddenly seems to be getting taller.

Also, the four days when they do bloom, they are important.  They start the second the tulips have finished.  They bloom with my 'Purple Sensation' alliums and overlap the euphorbia polychroma.  In another few minutes, we'll have roses and irises and herbaceous peonies and rhododendrons, and it will be another crazy parade in the yard.  But not yet.  Without the tree peonies, it would all be super-subtle here.

In addition, they make passersby gasp.  Non-gardeners will often stop me to ask, "What the HELL is that?" 

I'm from New Jersey.  While I'm not sporting big hair or very high heels or lots of jewelry or tons of make-up like many Jersey women of my age, I do have showy impulses that manifest themselves in my gardening style.  Plants that make my neighbors gasp are OK by me.

 

 

Crowd Wisdom

I have made a number of vegetable gardens in my life, but never one without removing the sod first.

Oh yeah, once I tried the wet newspaper method.  It didn't seem terribly successful to me, because the grass was still going strong months later under the newspaper.  And the cow manure I piled on top of the newspaper was weedy beyond belief, and it all wound up to be kind of a mess, until I got a plow in there to rip up and bury the sod.

But that was in a different, much more fertile place.  In my city yard in Saratoga Springs, the soil is sheer beach sand.  The grass doesn't really want to grow here anyway.

While I intended to rip all the sod off this spot, I exhausted myself last weekend ripping up sod down the street to expand the Lake Avenue Elementary School Garden.  I decided instead to listen to all the Rant readers who told me just to pile compost on top of the sod and plant into that.

This is what I've got to work with--a 7-yard pile of composted yard waste delivered at the bargain price of $140 by the city.  It's cooked into oblivion.  It's dense, it's wet.  I cannot imagine a blade of grass surviving after being buried in four or five inches of this stuff and being totally deprived of sunlight.

So I am giving the laziest of all garden-making methods a try.  I'll let you know how it goes.

 

5 Things I Love about Tomorrow's Garden

This review was originally published on Kirkus Reviews - click here to read the comments.  And check out Amy's A Conversation about Understanding Garden Design, published today.

After years of presenting America’s best gardens to magazine readers and writing about them for The New York Times, Stephen Orr finally found the time to compile the most interesting ones in his new book Tomorrow’s Garden. (Rodale Books, 2011.)

While it’s true that what makes these gardens so interesting are the myriad ways that they exemplify sustainability, don’t worry because Orr avoids the usual lists of environmental do’s and don’ts and their accompanying finger-shaking, and relies instead on photos that lure and inspire us to create environmentally responsible gardens that are also beautiful. Plus Orr includes stories of real people making some very nontraditional gardening choices - so there’s lots to love here. For me, these are the highlights:

1. His own journey. Orr grew up in West Texas, where “gardening for us was an act of forcibly bending nature to suit human will.” That meant disease-prone hybrid tea roses and “liberal doses of bright blue fertilizer.” His confession that he was “pretty naïve ecologically” rings true to us experienced gardeners and we can learn a lot from his journey toward “responsible gardening,” far more than we’d learn from the preachings of new converts to gardening.

2. Super-inclusiveness. Orr has taken pains to include a surprisingly wide range of gardens and garden-makers. We meet older gardeners who have edited out their more resource-intensive plants, as well as 20-somethings in our hipper cities starting rooftop farms and apiaries. We see not just small meadows and food gardens but also curb-side gardens and even formal gardens with clipped hedges. This huge range of options will no doubt lead to more cumulative changes than any single solution (kitchen gardens for all!).

3. Lawns, not so much. As a promoter of less lawn myself, I was thrilled by Orr’s statement that “One of the common denominators of a modern garden style is the absence of turf.” Indeed, most of the featured gardens have little or no lawn and instead use a whole slew of lawn alternatives: a grove of trees; lush groundcovers with stunning boulders; porous pavers; and a surprising number of gravel gardens. 

But hold on for the shocker - three of Orr’s chosen gardens, including the shady city lot above, use fake turfgrass! Not the old Astroturf, though – today’s synthetics are much better, while using scarce water on lawns has become crazier and crazier, especially in the desert. (What’s even crazier? That this realization has been so slow in coming.) And whether they’re fake or the real deal, Orr urges us to think of lawns as rugs, not wall-to-wall carpeting. Hear, hear! 

 4.Gardening as a joyous pursuit.  We’re used to treatises on “sustainable gardening” making it sound like as much fun as flossing, but thank goodness Orr believes that “Giving pleasure…is essential to any garden that we should wish to sustain.” Indeed, for most of us it’s the sensual rewards of beauty, fragrance, and working among the birds and bees that turn us into gardeners, not appeals to avoid doing harm in our yards. 

5. Stuff I’d never heard of.  Take Gabion walls, the stone-filled metal cages developed for erosion control that are used as walls and seating in this modern garden. Or the unknown-to-me fact that pea gravel is, um, nonrenewable and that a much better option is crushed limestone or granite (though the bad news is that the mining of all aggregates, even sand, is destructive to the environment.)  

See, it’s not easy being green, at least not perfectly green. But perfection isn’t what Tomorrow’s Garden is about. Thankfully.

To learn more about Tomorrow’s Garden, see Rodale’s interview with Stephen Orr.

Beautiful Things in Denver

Spotted at Denver Botanic Gardens:

This hillside.  I could look at this all day.

This amazing wall by Terry Maker.  (Warning:  You will spend all day on Terry's website.)

Betel nut in the conservatory. 

And so much more, but those are the highlights.

The Bay Area Bug March

To say that this is a complicated book tour would be an understatement. If you'd like to come out to one of these events, give the folks a call ahead of time and make sure the date and time is right.  Just in case.  Hope to see you there!

Wednesday, June 1, 2011 7 pm
Conservatory of Flowers
San Francisco, CA (This one's about Wicked Plants)

Thursday June 2, 2011
California State Master Gardener Conference
Sonoma, CA

Friday, June 3, 2011 7 PM
Copperfield's Books
Petaluma, CA

Saturday June 4, 2011 2:00
Amador County Master Gardeners
Amador, CA

Sunday, June 5, 2011 4:00
Book Passage
Corte Madera, CA

Monday, June 6, 2011 7:30 PM
Readers' Books
Sonoma, CA

Tuesday, June 7, 2011 7 pm
Carmel Public Library Foundation
Carmel, CA

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 7:30 pm
Capitola Book Cafe
Capitola, CA

Thursday, June 9, 2011 7:30 pm
Mrs. Dalloway's
Berkeley, CA

Friday, June 10, 2011 6:30 PM
Gallery Bookshop
Mendocino, CA

Saturday June 11, 2011 10-12

Live taping of West Coast Live--join us!

Palo Alto, CA

Raised bed winner, and more!

Thanks to all of you for commenting, and especially to Amanda at Always Be Cooking for posting this winning comment, chosen at random:

A raised bed? Sake's alive!
My dad is sixty-five!
He's retiring next week
and a garden he will seek!
If I win this cool raised bed
I give it to him, instead!

and by the way, Gen Schmidt and i messed around with a vertical garden kit, but she's the only one who has had a chance to really try it out so far.  Go check out North Coast Gardening for a full report--and yes, she's giving some away, so there's that, too---

 

Forget Gen Y. Make way for Generation G.

Guest post by Susan Morrison of Blue Planet Garden Blog 

 

Inspired by a talk by Kelly Norris, in 2009 I contributed a guest rant that proposed Gen Yers have a different attitude to gardening and a different relationship with their gardens than previous generations have had.  You can read the post here, but in part, it postulated that Gen Yers are (sometimes impatient) DIYers who embrace gardening as an experience to be integrated with their beliefs and lifestyles, and for the most part, prefer to get their information online rather than from books and lectures.

At the time, my perspective was formed primarily by my experience as a residential landscape designer and my observations of my Gen Y clients.  Since then, along with co-author Rebecca Sweet, I’ve researched and written a book, Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces.  During the process, I spent a lot of time talking with and learning from gardeners from many different backgrounds and age groups who would no more hire a landscape designer than I would hire a personal stylist.  Which got me wondering: based on this new input, if I wrote a post on Gen Y gardeners today, would I reach the same conclusions?

The short answer is yes.  I feel even more strongly that many Gen Yers take a holistic approach to gardening and are comfortable reinterpreting the definition of what a garden can be.  For example, their commitment to the environment, their passion for figuring things out for themselves and their tendency to rely on the internet rather than on books is all evident in an edible garden created in a tiny shared space by twenty-something gardener Emily Goodman. Taking advantage of repurposed objects, she filled the walls of her apartment building’s paved-over courtyard with an inspired collection of edible containers, including a homemade upside-down tomato cage, old filing cabinet drawers repurposed into herb boxes and  two PVC pipes converted into overflowing strawberry towers.  And in true Gen Y fashion, when we asked where she got her ideas, she explained most came from browsing Flickr (which coincidentally, is where we found her).

But the long answer is no. My new sense is that it’s not so much Gen Yers approaching gardening differently as it is all gardeners looking at their gardens in new ways.  Lest I give the impression I spend all my time hanging out with the younger set, I’ve been a Master Gardener for eight years and while our county includes members of all ages - well, let’s just say I go to a lot more 70th birthday parties than most people my age.  As I paged through the book, I realized some of the most innovative vertical strategies we highlighted were from older gardeners.  Case in point is this ingenious idea for camouflaging a chain link fence from friend and fellow MG Kathy Mendenhall. She not only came up with the idea to transform inexpensive garden lattice into a decorative screen, but she cut the pattern, painted it and attached it herself. 

Another example not in the book is Mary Lu Burchard, a lifelong gardener who traded in a mid-western garden of lawn and roses for a California paradise filled with native plants and salvaged items repurposed as garden art.  There’s nary a blade of grass in sight, and it is all maintained with only the help of her husband.

I could go on and on, but you get my drift.  Which leads me to the self-important announcement that I’m coining my own label:  Generation G for Generation Gardener. Whether it’s trading in lawn for meadows, ornamentals for edibles or chemicals for compost, the gardening world seems more open to change and innovation than ever before. And this new generation of gardeners, Generation G, isn’t defined by its age, but rather by its passion for learning, investment in new ways of sharing, and willingness to embrace change.

Susan Morrison is a landscape designer, garden writer and blogger in Northern California and the co-author of Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces.

The experiment

Over the past week, Ball FloraPlant has sent me* 4 big boxes of annuals, most of them brightly colored petunias, osteospermum, verbena, calibrachoa, and other sun-loving container plants. To test, I guess—but both the amount and (to some degree) the type of plants are inappropriate for my small, mostly shaded courtyard space. I’ve used what I could, and, fortunately, I have at my disposal 11 large concrete planters that are all in fairly sunny positions. These are designed for the beautification of our neighborhood’s commercial district, and since I am the beautification chair, I am in charge of filling them. We use a professional service for our hanging baskets, but there’s not enough left in the budget to do that for the planters.

For most of them, I used a mix of homegrown seedlings raised by an Allentown resident in his basement, and they all have cannas that have been overwintered for the past ten years by another neighbor. But for one, I planted it (shown almost filled above) with the Ball offerings. There was no regard for color clashes or harmony of form. There are red petunias, fuschia petunias, bright orange marigolds, maroon verbena, bright red verbena, and pink calibrachoa. And some other stuff. I thought  a multi-colored burst would be fun; the others are more conservative.

Sorry, earth, I did not use the plantable pots—any sign that something is already in a pot could say “steal me.” Some of these planters are filled with invisible weeds that will materialize in abundance in about a month. Passers-by invariably mistake them—even when they’re filled with flowers—for  seating or garbage bins, and sometimes people just pull the plants out for fun.  They’re watered by volunteers—most of the time. I pulled a full bag of disposable needles out of this one once.

All reasons why I saw this as the ideal testing situation—thanks, Ball Floraplant!—and I’ll be reporting on their progress. Are any of you participating in public beautification projects? Frustrating, rewarding, or both?

*F.T.C.-required gift disclosure

Madhur Jaffrey Cookbooks: We Have Winners

Great comments, so it was difficult to choose just two people to send cookbooks to.  In the end, I decided the books should go to Christopher C and Laura, because they sound as if they could really use them!  Please send your mailing addresses to me at mchlowens@yahoo.com.

Evangelical

I like buying plants, but not nearly as much as I like giving them away.  I think the difference is that when I'm buying something new, I'm never quite certain of its success.  But when I'm digging things out of my yard, I am passing them on aglow in the knowledge that they will be great.

The recipients of my chopped up, muddy and bedraggled gifts, on the other hand, often look slightly dubious about the value of what they are receiving.

I was thinking about the joys of giving as I was digging things up for the big fundraiser for the Lake Avenue Elementary School Garden Club this weekend, a perennial sale.

Since I'm taking out a relatively new perennial bed and replacing it with vegetables, I have a lot to share.  I was particularly happy that I managed to dig out a bunch of 'Pink Giant' lilies without breaking the stems off of the bulbs.  I also dug up gold-leafed tansy, Japanese painted fern, Solomon's Seal, sedum 'Autumn Joy,' a white astilbe, two 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain' roses--victims of a standardization experiment for which I really didn't have adequate sun, 'Endless Summer' hydrangeas, euphorbia polychroma, a lovely old-fashioned pale blue bearded iris, a white peony, pieces of my giant canna 'Tropicana' corm, etc. etc.--lots of stock.

I'm not, however, a total saint.  A neighbor recently asked me for a piece of my brunnera macrophylla  'Jack Frost,' and I will lop a piece off for him because he's an excellent neighbor who gives me interesting plants in return.  I thought, however, about digging Jack up and breaking him in four to benefit the school garden sale...and moved along before committing such violence on a beautiful and expensive plant.

So it's pretty clear that I don't pass along plants because I'm a paragon of generosity...any more than the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses who come to my door are paragons of generosity.  What I am is a true believer, just like them.

I'm convinced that the plants I am giving away will change the recipients' lives.  I am trying to infect my neighbors with my own outsized enthusiasm in order to make new gardeners, and it's entirely selfish.  More gardeners inevitably means living in a more beautiful world.

Huffington Post Infested with Bed Bugs, Tapeworms, Maggots

And now, the Wicked Bugs HuffPo slide show. Do feel free to head over there to share your comments, thoughts, fears and fantasies.

Gnomes!

Here is what I posted on the Kirkus Books blog last week and click here to read Susan's review of Tomorrow's Garden. —Eliz.

Are gnomes the new vampires and fairies the new witches? And where do zombies fit in? For the most part, I accept with resignation the abundant presence of supernatural creatures in the worlds of literature and pop culture. Personally, I’d rather be entertained by more-or-less real people doing more-or-less real things. But there is no question that the Harry Potter, Twilight, Wicked, and LOTR franchises are huge, and drag a flotilla of lesser-known fantastic inventions behind them.

The gnome phenomenon is part of a strange assortment of otherworldly creations that have intermittently caught the public’s fancy over the past few decades (remember troll dolls?). Normally, I wouldn’t think too much about them; that is, if not for their longstanding connection with the world of garden decor, and the recent release of several gnome-related books.

Although Chuck Sambuchino’s How to Survive a Gnome Attack (Ten Speed Press, 2010) has probably gotten the most attention, especially now that it is soon to be—yes—an R-rated movie, a classier option might be Gnomes, from Abrams. The artbook publishing house has just released this as the ultimate gnome coffee table tome. Packaged with 8 frameable prints, it is actually a re-release of a 1976 Dutch book with text by Wil Huygen and illustrations by Rein Poortvliet. 

Both Huygen and Poortvliet have since died, which adds to the heirloom quality of the gnome lore, legends, and tall tales here, pulled together nicely by Poortvliet’s drawings and paintings. The Dutch artist was a masterful wildlife painter, and the best illustrations in the book show gnomes interacting with other woodland creatures like foxes, birds, and rabbits. As for the text, the nine legends that close the book are probably the most rewarding reading, with the rest of Gnomes largely devoted to illustrated descriptive matter like the following:

The gnome’s life-span is around 400 years. They lead healthy lives. They don’t eat too much, have few emotional problems, and get plenty of exercise.

They do indulge in pipe-smoking and do not shun mildly alcoholic drinks!

If you know someone with a yen for gnomes—and I am sure you do—this would be the book to give them, especially with the prints as a bonus. It’s not nearly as silly as the gnome survival book, and would certainly take longer to read.  However, talk of the merits of gnome books sidesteps the real issue. A book can be shelved, a movie can be watched and forgotten, but the very real presence of plaster, resin, or plastic gnomes as semi-permanent features in gardens is another matter altogether.

For decades, gnomes have been a very common feature in British gardens, so much so that many should really be called gnome enclosures, as they contain very little in the way of plant life (see example above).  The more I hear about gnome books and movies Stateside, the more I wonder if scenes like this will become as common in the U.S. as they are in the U.K.  (There is already a gnome liberation movement—freethegnomes.com—which, ironically if unsurprisingly, has Google ads offering gnomes for sale on its front page.) While I appreciate that gnome lore has centuries behind it, its contemporary manifestation ultimately takes an all-too-common form—boatloads of mass-produced crap that can’t be composted and is seldom reused. Garden objects like gnomes are all too often offered by garden centers as “focal points” that take the place of real design.

It’s an interesting paradox: the most fanciful products of the human imagination are marketed to consumers as a way to replace imagination.

Do I dare to discuss fairies? Maybe next time.

Exploding Watermelons! Bt in Your Bloodstream! This Week in Horrifying Ag News

Oh, the fun just never stops!  First, this just in from China--overuse of a growth chemical called forchlorfenuron causes watermelons to explode in the fields.  Which is a bummer for the farmers, but also brings up a larger question:  if they're applying too much of this stuff, and using it at the wrong time, what else are they applying too much of?

Yeah.

And another story not getting nearly enough attention:  You know that Bt toxin engineered into GMO corn? The one that's not supposed to bother humans because it gets killed off in our digestive tracts?

Guess what? Not so much.  A new study coming out in the journal Reproductive Toxicology found that--whoa!  Of 39 pregnant and 30 non-pregnant women tested, most of them had the toxin in their bloodstream, as did their fetuses.  Read all about it here.

But that's probably okay, right?  So what if the toxin's in the bloodstream?  Who's to say it's doing any harm? Maybe it's just--you know--hanging out, minding its own business...

Right?

Uh--enjoy your lunch, everybody.

A Raised Bed in Twenty Seconds or Less

I am not a builder of raised beds.  Pile up some compost and plant straight into it, that's what I like.  I think straw bales make a perfectly fine raised bed (and leave you with some nice compost at the end of the season for mulch).  When Fine Gardening was in town a couple of years ago, they made a video about my little straw bale garden, which you can watch here if you're not clear on the concept.

But I'm shifting some things around in my garden, and there's a spot by my kitchen door where I thought a raised bed would be nice for growing a few salad greens and herbs.  The garbage cans get dragged past this little area, and we tend to use it as a staging area for any kind of messy home improvement project we might be in the middle of.  So putting some structure around this bed seemed like a better idea than just making a mound and planting into it.

So the people at EarthEasy asked me if they could send me a raised bed to try out, and I said sure, bring it on.  It was time to get going on that little salad garden anyway.  They sent two--one for me and one for Genevieve Schmidt--and we assembled them in my garden.

 

 

The video pretty much says it all.  No hardware, just slots and pegs. The wood is untreated cedar.  They are stackable, and while you could screw in some brackets to hold the stacks together, I'm not sure it's necessary--probably the mass of the soil and plant roots, combined with the expansion of the wood as it settles in and gets wet, will be enough to keep the whole thing upright.  (Oh, and if you want to see the full length, unedited version of our assembly process, where it is much more apparent that I stood around and made Gen do all the work, go here.)

And yes!  We have not one, but two, to give away!  If you'd like a 4 x 8 raised bed from EarthEasy, you're going to have to work for it.  Poetry!  I demand poetry! A limerick, a haiku, a rhyming couplet--something!  You can do it.  Or--you could go to Gen's blog, North Coast Gardening, where she's also giving one away, and try your luck over there.)

Bed bugs, scorpions, et al descend upon NY and CT

The bug march continues. Here's the plan for New York and Connecticut--would love to see you East Coast types while I'm there!

 

Monday, May 23, 2011 6 PM
Horticultural Society of New York
New York City, NY

Wednesday, May 25, 2011 6:30 PM
Clearfield Public Library
Williamsville, NY  (This is the Buffalo area--Elizabeth, Michele and I will actually get to hang out together and drink some of whatever wonderful thing Elizabeth has concocted for us)

Thursday, May 26, 2011 7 pm
RJ Julia Booksellers
Madison, CT

And also on Thursday, Michele will be at Urban Roots in Buffalo at 7 PM speaking about Grow the Good Life. Get there early if you're going--I know it'll be a packed house.

The Gardeners at Chanticleer

I had a chance to visit Chanticleer Garden last week on my way to Rodale and am gushing about it here and there, mostly with my photos.  So for Rant readers I'll send you to those links and just show off two of Chanticleer's staff of experts.

On the left is Doug Croft, who's in charge of the whole kitchen garden, and seemingly lots more.  Doug gave me a tour, pointing out everything new since my visit in 2009 and making sure all my questions got answered.

Above right is a new addition to the Chanticleer staff - Lucy Dinsmore, the horticulturist daughter of  D.C. Master Gardener Barbara Dinsmore. 

Oh, and just one more - Bill Thomas, executive director of Chanticleer.   I actually took this shot two years ago but I have no doubt he still looks this dashing.

More "Meet the Author" Nights, please!

As promised, I attended the recent "Meet the Author" event at the Rodale Institute in Kutztown, PA, featuring three Rodale authors - Derek Fell, Stephen Orr, and our own Michele Owens.  In the photo left they're listening intently to event moderator Ethne Clarke, editor-in-chief of Organic Gardening Magazine.

Notice what's weird/different about the venue?  Everyone's sitting on bales of hay that are covered with burlap or kitschy tablecloths, and we're in a threshing barn from the 1800s.  Standing room only in a threshing barn - possibly a publishing world first?

Do it again!
My pitch to the Rodale folks that night wasn't to sign me up for a book deal (too much work!) but to have more of these events - in not just country barns but in cities and 'burbs, too.  Bringing several authors together makes the event a happening; it increases the turn-out and the fun, too.  And fun was had in this historic barn. 

News flash - magazine editors are very cool
That was a big take-away for both of us Ranters, based on these two delightful ones.  Stephen took over the gardening reigns at Martha Stewart Living last fall, and Ethne's revamping of Organic Gardening has been a roaring success.

The books
Last but not least, the books we gathered to hear more about were Michele's Grow the Good Life, Derek's Vertical Gardening (his 84th book!) and Stephen's Tomorrow's Garden, which I'll be reviewing here next week. 

Creepy or cool? You be the judge!

Actually I would rather have this than a star named after me. Bios Urn.