Meet Colleen. The effervescent garden blogger who oozes sanguinity as she comments and shares her garden posts. I've been following her blog In the Garden Online for a little while and really enjoy her spontaneity and obvious love of her garden and gardening in general. Her generous spirit like Val and Kerri before her has given yet another great post to move our gardening efforts forward.

I'd like to thank Stuart up front for inviting me to be a guest blogger while he's gallivanting around Tasmania. Unfortunately, it's winter here, so I'll have to forgo talking about gardening. Instead, I'll talk about one of my other favorite subjects: garden blogging.

Can garden blogging make you a better gardener?

This is one of those 'chicken and the egg' questions, but as far as I'm concerned, the answer is a definite, absolute YES! I've been a gardener for a long time, first in a small bed in the first place my husband and I rented, and now in my own quarter of an acre outside of Detroit. I've loved it since the moment my first seed sprouted, but something happened when I started blogging about it in the summer of 2006. I noticed more. I became not just a gardener, but an observer of my own garden.

The strength of any blog lies in not only having something to say, but in posting frequently. There have been so many times when I've thought "I have nothing going on in the garden, but I really should make a blog entry". On those occasions, I've gone out to the garden, walked around, and, lo and behold, found something interesting to write about, whether it's been my adoration of all stages of a flower (not just the full-bloom stage) or a rant on the compost restrictions in my neighborhood.

And, when you observe more, you end up doing more. You catch problems early on, before you have a disaster on your hands. Maybe most importantly, blogging has made me a more active gardener. I'm one of those people who has thousands of ideas 'the type of person who's always saying "oh, I'm going to do this in the garden...."' and among all of the other parts of my life, the garden projects get neglected. Now that I'm blogging, and posting my photos on the blog, I feel like I have to do those projects I say I'm going to do. It helps me fight my tendency toward procrastination. And I need all the help I can get :-)

But perhaps the biggest benefit to blogging about gardening is the community you become a part of, and, even better, the friends you make. The best place for gardeners to learn, more than books, magazines, or television shows, is from other gardeners. I have learned more about plants, compost, tools, and garden design in this last year of garden blogging than I had learned in several years before blogging.

When I'm stumped about a problem in my garden, or trying to figure out whether a seedling that popped up in one of my beds is a weed or a perennial, I know I can post it on my blog, and someone will have an answer for me in no time. As I alluded to above, it goes deeper than just getting cheerful advice from fellow gardeners. I consider some of the garden bloggers out there to truly be my friends, even though I'll most likely never meet them.

I'd be hard-pressed to find cooler, more enthusiastic people anywhere else. I'm biased, of course, but if you're looking for what a blog should be, you would do well to take a look at any of these blogs, all created by bloggers who I consider to be friends:

Kim's A Study in Contrasts: For beautiful writing, gorgeous photos, and a keen eye for stunning plant combinations, this is a can't-miss. Besides that, I have the nagging suspicion that Kim is my long-lost sister :-)

Carol's May Dreams Gardens: Carol is one of those people who has helped make garden bloggers into a true community by founding both the Garden Bloggers Book Club and the new Garden Bloggers Bloom Day.

Annie's The Transplantable Rose: Annie has a way with words and a penchant for storytelling that makes you lose yourself in her blog.

Anthony's Compost Bin: Every gardener should be in love with compost. Anthony's enthusiasm for it is contagious.

And, finally, Stuart's Gardening Tips 'n' Ideas: I remember the first time I read Stuart's blog. He was writing about his frustration with garden blogs, and how he wishes there was more real, meaningful dialogue on the blogosphere. I was fairly new to blogging, and took his rant to heart, especially his hope that gardeners would start extolling their gardening passion rather then just quietly walking by. So, you could easily say that Stuart is one of those people who helped me become the kind of garden blogger I am.

I think, soon, those of us who blog about our gardens find that the blogging becomes almost inseparable from the gardening, and that the gardening is inseparable from who we are as people. Garden blogging is addictive, but so is garden blog reading. Here's a salute to those of you who blog, and my hope that those of you who don't yet blog will consider starting! Drop me a line when you do :-)

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Meet Val. Val's the one-eyed Carlton supporter who owns the the blog domain carltonrules.blogspot.com and keeps me up to date with all things happening at Princes Park - and no, that's not a garden. Val is great fun and comments abundantly here on this blog and every other blog I find. Yet Val will often beaten me there.

A retired librarian who loves to create books, not write them - but create them (you will understand when you've spent some time on her blog). She spends her days camping, touring the world, exhorting the 'man who cooks' and writes a great post or two, or three or ....

To guest blog or not? At first I thought, nah, I don’t really concentrate on the garden in my blog, even less so now than before, what with the effects of the 10 year drought and all. However, I had recently thought I might post something in my own blog about the water harvesting devices hubby has installed, waiting until our 5000 litre tank was delivered (more than a month’s wait). But here was Stu, a blogger buddy, asking me to do a guest blog, and as he supports the same football team I do, how could I say no?

So 10 years of drought in Victoria, previously known as the Garden State. What does this mean to a city dweller not locked in daily battle with Mother Nature like country people are? Did I ever think I’d miss rain or feel overjoyed hearing rain on the roof? What about the intense interest in how full the reservoirs are? I would bet that many Melburnians could now give you the percentage of the current water storage in Victoria to within a few percentage points.

Here in the city we are currently on Stage 3 water restrictions which means, amongst other things, that there are only 2 days a week when we can water gardens (NOT lawns), between the hours of 6 – 8 a.m. and 8 -10 p.m. Drippers and handheld hoses or buckets only, no sprinklers.

When this was first announced, every man and his dog raced down to their local Hardware Heaven, otherwise known as Bunnings, to completely buy out the entire stock of drippers. Of course, buying them is one thing, installing them and/or converting from a sprinkler system is another.

Fortunately, my hubby has had quite a bit of experience at installing irrigation systems in the 3 gardens we’ve had over the years. He is sorry now he didn’t go for drippers years ago because with that system the plants get water directly to the root system, and it’s more efficient than spraying water around which is not only ill directed but can evaporate. He has noticed that some plants are very happy with drippers, despite the drought.

However, Stage 4 has been predicted for May, which means that there will be NO WATERING OF GARDENS as well as lawns. This refers to water from the tap, but now people are starting to think about the water that oh so occasionally falls from the sky onto the roof, flows down the downpipes and into the storm water system, lost to the land. How to trap that? The new buzz words around town are “water harvesting”, and amazingly quickly new products have appeared on the market that help capture water for the garden, and reuse elsewhere.

Overnight we have seen a whole industry develop, specialising in diverting the water from the downpipes off the roof, either directly onto the garden or into holding tanks. Here’s one of 3 installed at our place.

Then there’s the water from our washing machine, which is a water efficient front loader. The water goes from the laundry trough out to a place where hubby has intercepted it with a “kit” he bought. And there I thought he had cobbled it together himself! Those green twist ties are a bit amateurish looking but so far there have been no leaks.

And then there’s the latest trendy “must-have”: your very own tank for the serious water harvester. The suppliers have not been able to keep up with the demand. Hopefully we’ll have ours in 4 or 5 weeks. We’ll be putting it at the back of the carport, in a designer color to blend with the house. Here is a simulation of where the tank will go. It will be 5000 litres. Then we pray for rain.

There are other ideas to follow up, but of course we’re participating in the latest craze, the Shower Shuffle, where you capture water in a bucket while waiting for the water to warm up and while showering. Sorry, no photos.

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Kerri from Colors of the Garden is the star guest blogger today as she shares of her passion with fuschias. I've really enjoyed conversing with Kerri over the past year and she epitomizes what blogs are about - they really are just an international cyber-fence that we can hang our heads over and have a natter. If you haven't met Kerri (or her husband Ross) yet, pour yourself a cuppa and spend some time delving through her archives. They're all as good as this one...

Stuart has generously offered to give me the run of his blog, in a guest post, while he’s off gallivanting in Tasmania. I thought, “Why not? I haven’t had a trip to my beloved birth country since 2003, and I’ve never been to Western Australia. If I can’t go physically, at least I can have a virtual trip”. So here I am!

My first thoughts were of the glorious gardens my mother used to grow, and specifically, her magnificent fuchsias.

Mom lived in Palm Beach, NSW during my teen years, and then later at Nelson Bay in Port Stevens, NSW. She had the greenest thumb imaginable, and grew a great deal of her plants from cuttings.

She had many different fuchsias. Some in hanging baskets, some in containers and others in the ground, almost all grown from cuttings. The plants in the ground grew into very large shrubs, up to 6ft tall, laden with beautiful ballerina-like blooms dancing from gracefully arced boughs.

Unless one is lucky enough to have a greenhouse over here in our Northeastern United States climate (we are just barely in zone 5…surrounded by zone 4), we must buy our fuchsias in hanging baskets or containers from plant nurseries early in the spring.

The hard part is deciding which variety to buy. I make myself stick to one basket of fuchsia because there are so many other plants I want as well. For the past 3 years I’ve chosen ‘Marinka’, a red variety, for its vigorous growth habit and the fact that hummingbirds adore it. And for the most part, I’ve had really good luck with it.

But then there’s that gorgeous pale pink, with a hint of green on the tips that I fell in love with last year. Or the purple and red combination, or “Swingtime”, which is red and white, or…..well, you get the picture. I have a little trouble making up my mind….and this is just the fuchsia! I still have all those other plants to decide on. A trip to the nursery can become a long, drawn out affair for me.

If I’m lucky, and don’t kill the plant by under or over watering, I can enjoy about 4 or 5 months of lovely blooms. As a rule, we don’t get a great deal of hot weather during our short summers, but I find it’s best to move the fuchsia out of the afternoon sun if the day is a hot one. I just move it over one hook, from the edge of the porch roof, to underneath the roof. And I usually need to water it morning and night in very hot weather, because the container dries out very quickly. I’ve found that if I feed it about every 10 days with Bloom Booster flower food (15-30-15) it will produce blossoms continually all summer.

As the cold weather approaches I’m always very reluctant to let the container plants suffer their fate of being killed by a frost, so I carry them back and forth between the inside and out until it gets to be too much of a chore. But this winter was unusually mild until half way through January, and the fuchsia and several other plants survived on our enclosed side porch all that time. When the temperatures finally began dipping to freezing and below I brought the plants inside and put them upstairs in a spare bedroom by a sunny window.

I cut the fuchsia back, and was surprised to see a few blooms on it during these last couple of months. It’s looking very healthy, which leads me to believe that I might end up with another season’s worth of enjoyment from this plant. What a bonus!

And just think, around Mother’s Day I’ll be able to treat myself to a brand new fuchsia, feeling free this year to choose one of those other wonderful varieties

I certainly would love to be able to grow 6 ft high fuchsias like my mother did though. Perhaps I could do it vicariously through Stuart. I’ll have to talk to him about that when he gets back from his trip.

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