Jeff Ball: The Yardener

Web sites offer gardening and landscaping advice

One of our favorite gardening magazines, Chicagoland Gardening, has announced it's going out of business. I think there are several issues bringing down an interesting and entertaining gardening magazine. Of course, the lousy economy is probably the immediate culprit; advertisers are having to cut back like everyone else.

But I suspect something else is happening here. Just as most magazines and newspapers in this country are losing subscribers and readers, Chicagoland Gardening failed because gardeners are more and more going to the Internet for their information.

There are well more than 50 garden-related Web sites out there including our www.yardener.com. More than 50 lawn and garden businesses have Web sites with extensive gardening information, at least related to their product line. And then there are the forums and the blogs. I know of at least 20 active garden related forums and I've read that the number of gardening blogs exceeds 150. All those sites on the Internet represent an incredible amount of gardening and yard care information increasing every day and it is all free for the most part.

You can be sure that life partner Nancy Szerlag and I are paying quite a bit of attention to this phenomenon. We are taking a somewhat new approach in running our information business.

Both of us, hopefully, will continue to write our two columns a week for the Detroit News Homestyle section. While the recent columns are archived on the Detroit News Web site, www.detnews.com/homestyle, within a few months they are no longer easily available.

So we have set up a new blog called Nancy's Garden Blog (http://nancysgarden.wordpress.com). Each week, we will post last week's gardening and yardening columns. You can keep up with our weekly words of wisdom even if you are in Seattle. Our columns can now be retrieved for years. However, there is a twist that we feel makes our blog even more valuable.

In virtually every post on our blog we will link that post to additional information on the same topic found in our Web site, www.yardener.com. We have more than 3,500 pages of detailed plant care, gardening, lawn care and landscape care information on that Web site. Most of the files in the Web site have links to the manufacturers of any tool or product that is discussed in that file giving the reader further information on their topic of interest.

We hope you all will find this method of communicating gardening information useful. Now we have to figure out Facebook and Twitter.

Jeff Ball is a Metro Detroit freelance garden writer. His Web site is www.yardener.com. E-mail him at jeffball@yardener.com. Check out the blog he shares with Nancy Szerlag at http://nancysgarden.wordpress.com.