Category: General

What makes a good gardening blog?

Lynsey on Marginalia recently posted about his quest to find a good gardening blog. He explained how bloggers increase search engine rankings of an otherwise uninteresting blog by creating irrelevant external links. Some bloggers use ‘splogs’ which are blogs set up purely for generating spam links to their own blogs. These frivolous links pollute services like Google or Technorati, and make it harder to find quality blogs.

We don’t know any garden bloggers that pollute search engines, do we?

So what was Lynsey’s conclusion?

“All I’m trying to find is a couple of gardening blogs, well written, frequently updated, nicely photographed etc. I tried to get some sense out of Google, tried some blogrolls – but in the end, while I’m more than prepared to fight for your right to have another kitten blog, it’s not what I want right now, and I just haven’t found one that delivers the goods yet. I think ultimately I’ll just write my own…”

What are we missing? What is that special ingredient which makes a good garden blog? What can we do to draw attention to good blogs, and away from mediocre ones? Is garden blogging dead? Is it just that Lynsey is in the middle of a New Zealand summer while those of us in the northern hemisphere have just passed the winter solstice, so there is nothing to blog about?

Are we just always going to suck, or is there some hope for us?

If you read our blog with a browser, you will notice a new look. We’ve updated our theme and hope this one is easier to read.

RSS users won’t notice any change.

If anyone reading this is thinking about starting their own blog, let me tell you that the first post is without a doubt the hardest. Where do you start? What do you say that sets the tone and lays the groundwork for everything else that follows?

Perhaps first I will say something about the name Birfucated Carrots. To bifurcate means to divide into two or more parts or branches. Last year in our garden we planted some amazing carrots, all heirloom or old varieties. We had purple, white, yellow, orange and multicolor ones. The one thing they all had in common was they nearly all bifurcated because of the hard clay ground they were grown in. They tasted fine, and were a delight to eat, they just looked a little funny both because of the colors and the shapes. Anyway, thus was born the name of our weblog.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am Patrick Wiebe. I was born near Chicago in the US, and currently live in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I worked for many years as an IT consultant, but at the moment I am finding other things to do with my time.

My current interest is heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables. In general heirloom refers to older varieties of plants that are untouched by modern agricultural technologies and free from patents and intellectual property rights. By definition, these are plants that the seeds can be saved from, and when replanted the resulting plants will grow true to their parents. The name heirloom came about because before WWII, it was common to save and replant saved seeds. These seeds often stayed in families and were passed on from generation to generation.

Anyway, I will avoid getting too deep into the subject of heirloom vegetables on my very first post, and instead save most of the details for later. Hopefully, Steph will also share some things with you, as well as perhaps other family members and friends.