April is the Blog Love Month

Another excuse for a view of Great Dixter: the Sunken Garden this time :)
Emma Cooper, that all-round good egg of garden blogging has come up with a great challenge for April: spread a little blog love. I found out on Monday, because I was one of the first recipients :)

In her kick-off post Emma says:

It has been a bit of a gloomy old start to the year. The sun won’t come out and play, the NHS is being dismantled and anyone with a blog has been battling spam comments every day [too right - Ed]. Now we can’t do anything about the first, and it feels like we can’t do much about the second, but we can bring some love to bloggers everywhere (because we do love them, don’t we?) and so I am starting the April Blog Love Challenge.

Emma is commenting on 5 blogs a day, then sharing those posts back over at her blog. Hers will be a combination of old favourites and new discoveries. I've modified her challenge for my purposes because I've been trying to comment on 5 blogs a day since last November (it was my NaBloPoMo replacement). Instead, I'll be commenting on one blog a day I've not commented on before, preferably one I've not seen previously either.

I'm also sharing my discoveries on Twitter using Emma's hashtag #bloglove. I thought it would also be a good idea to have a weekly round-up of the blogs I've discovered. Hopefully it'll help me to keep up with my challenge ;)

So here goes:
  • First up is Alex Ramsey, whose photography I've admired for a very long time.
  • Leaves, Stems and Thorns - a discovery via a comment on my response to Gayla Trayle's Grow Write Guild - who writes about their first garden. 
  • Curious? Gardener - I met Colin at Great Dixter last week and have enjoyed discovering his blog since. I commented on his post about Dicentra. 
  • Staying with Great Dixter, we also learnt about the Christopher Lloyd Scholarship and how Maggie Tran - this year's recipient - is keeping a diary of her year at Great Dixter.
  • CJ from Above the River - started blogging a few days ago and left a comment for me earlier in the week :)
  • Ann Somerset Miles - many of you will be familiar with Ann's work already, but may not know she's blogging about Malvern in the run up to the spring show. You can catch up with what's happening via her new blog and I hope to see you at the show on Thursday.
  • And finally if you're a Blogger blogger, check out The Real Blogger Status. Nitecruzr aka Chuck Croll is very helpful on Google's 'Something is Broken' forum and his blog has lots of useful information about the key Blogger issues of the day.
Thanks for the Challenge Emma - may this post send good things your way! And thanks to those of you who've chosen Veg Plotting for a spot of Blog Love too :)

Have you made any great blogging discoveries recently?

Comments

  1. Lea7 April 2013 at 13:26

    I love to find new blogs!
    There is one in The Netherlands called iwings. It is more about birds and other animals than gardening, but very interesting. www.iwings.blogspot.com
    We are finally getting some nice Spring weather here. Hope you are having a wonderful day!
    Lea
    Lea's Menagerie

    ReplyDelete
  2. Eleanor Ferguson7 April 2013 at 13:44

    Hi - newish blogger and occasional inept gardener here. Dug my veg plot yesterday and hoping for more success than last year so off to purchase some seeds this aft. Will sow some directly and some in trays. Have vague recollection that I should plant lettuces in same spot as in previous years. Does this matter? And what else should I do to my soil before planting? Have some dodgy twiggy compost in a green bin mostly made up of grass cuttings which I could add. Or should I do what I have done i previous years and add a grow bag or two? All help appreciated! By the way I like your blog love challenge. Is it just for garden bloggers? Not sure what kind of blog mine is. Started off as fashion but I tend to write about other things too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. VP7 April 2013 at 14:13

    Hi Lea - thanks for sharing your discovery - who knows, it might appear on next week's Blog Love :)

    Eleanor - hi and thanks for Following! Strictly speaking you should follow a crop rotation for most crops such as potatoes, onions, brassicas etc. to reduce the likelihood of diseases etc. Lettuces tend to be the kind of thing which gets fitted in amongst the other crops in the rotation. I will be growing lettuces in the same spot at home though in the area I've set aside for them. I will be refreshing the compost and adding some feed. How well rotted are the grass cuttings? Might be best to add some brown waste such as shredded newspaper and mix it in with your greener waste, so it rots down into a nice crumbly mix. The twigs will help with aeration but will need sieving out later. Adding old grow bags and any other kind of mulch will help the soil enormously. Whether you need to add anything else will depend on what you're growing in a particular spot.

    Blog love is for everyone, it just happens to have been started by a garden blogger: Emma Cooper. I'll also be sharing the love re some of my non-garden blogs as well as garden blogs :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Alex Ramsay8 April 2013 at 10:54

    Thank you VP! Though I have to say that my posts seem to have little to do with gardens at the moment. Perhaps this will change when spring finally arrives . . .

    ReplyDelete
  5. Helle (Helen)8 April 2013 at 18:20

    I discovered Welly Woman not too long ago and RealMenSow very recently, like them both very much - especially Welly Woman who writes about very interesting and important topics, not always directly to do with gardening.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anna8 April 2013 at 22:09

    An excellent idea VP. I was trying to post about my new discoveries every month but somehow my intentions have gone astray. Have not had much time for blog hopping recently so will leap from here to at least one new blog :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. CJ10 April 2013 at 07:06

    Thank you so much for including me in your list VP. I always love to read your blog, there is always something interesting to be found here, thank you for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  8. VP11 April 2013 at 08:26

    Alex - you're welcome. Photography is one of my interests so I don't mind the lack of garden photos :)

    Helle - yes, I read those too. So glad you've mentioned them as they don't meet ny criteria for my challenge to comment on blogs I haven't commented on before.

    CJ - you're very welcome and welcome to blogging!

    ReplyDelete

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