It’s My Blog’s Birthday!

Today marks the first anniversary of My Northern Garden going online. I probably would never have started a blog if I did not live in the blogging-est town in America, Northfield, MN, so my thanks to the folks at Northfield.org, Locallygrown, Penelopedia, Rough Draft, and the rest of Northfield’s blog community for inspiring this effort. Thanks to Griff Wigley who got me started from a technical perspective, and to Tom McKusick and the staff at the MSHS, who link to my ramblings from their homepage.

The blog has also helped me connect with a wider community of garden bloggers, and many of those  educational and entertaining web sites are linked to from this page. Check them out.

So, from a statistical point of view, how did the year go?

• The blog has had just over 20,000 page views.
• The month with the largest number of visits was April, followed closely by May.  Worst month: November. (This is typical of garden web sites, I’m told.)
• People click here most often from Northfield.org and MSHS.
• Most popular post was one I wrote last October on planting minor bulbs. However, several posts related to red twig dogwoods get readers nearly every day.
• The Google term most likely to bring someone to My Northern Garden: “Red Twig Dogwood”
• Other popular terms that bring folks here: allium, raspberries, bee condo, pineapple sage, front yard gardening, and (my personal favorite) manure pots.

One of the best things about maintaining the blog is that it has gotten me out in my garden to take pictures, not just to weed or dig or look at plants and wonder what’s gone wrong now. By taking pictures, I’ve had a chance to look more closely at the garden and all of its inhabitants, to pay attention to what is happening in my small, sometimes unkempt patch of earth. This virtual activity has strangely put me more in touch with the real world around me.