Garden Resources
When we first started Vermont Flower Farm, sometime after Labor Day each year we would close the business for a few days, hire a house sitter, and head to Maine. For us, it was a few days to catch our breath and rejuvenate enough to return and make it through Columbus Day and then close up for the winter. Over the years, Alex, Gail and I have developed a fond relationship with Maine which draws us there like a strong magnet. For me my love for Maine started when I was about five. My dad would scrape up enough loose change and a few dollars to head to the ocean that my mother loved so dearly. Those were the days when cabins cost $5 a night and fishermen would sell fresh fish at the dock for unbelievable prices. My parents as well as the $5 cabins and cheap seafood have all passed but for us, the visits to Maine will always continue. As our business grew, we found that it was more prudent to have one of us stay at the farm and split the trip to Maine. In recent years Gail and Alex have made an annual trip and I try to go around Memorial Day week and again in mid-October. They like the beaches, reading books and eating seafood, and I like to hike the mountains and the ocean trails and visit gardens and nurseries just like Vermont Flower Farm.
Our trips find us sitting by the ocean reading stacks of books, magazines and trade journals, enjoying sunny days and eating fresh seafood. It is surprising how reading material piles up during the spring and summer months when the days are long and spare time doesn’t exist.
As I sat in my glory by the ocean in 2006, I read an article in a direct marketing magazine about the importance of Internet social networking. The linkages made great sense to me and the fact that I could set up a Google Blogger account for free in a couple minutes was even better.
The theory was that blogs drew readership and readership redirected to a web site would convert to some amount of additional income. I returned home and set up a blog I named The Vermont Gardener. The concept and the undertaking were so easy that a month later I set up Vermont Gardens, a second blog, intended to follow the movement and growth of our new nursery. Today the two blogs have merged into The Vermont Gardener, which remains unfunded and commercial free. It generates a reader interest but has taken a back seat to this web page, two Facebook pages (Vermont Flower Farm and Gardens, and also George Africa), and our vermontflowerfarm Instagram account. Our original web page that I designed with a of pile books and Dreamweaver over 25 years ago morphed into the Wordpress site you are reading now. I am learning, again with books and the help and kind patience of Lara Maville Design (www.mavilledesign.com), how to build a site that will let you walk through our gardens via the web.
Notice the image of granite blocks and big-linked chain up above here? I dug them out of the bowels of an old barn foundation while developing the framework for a hosta and shade garden at our home on Peacham Pond Road. There were two smaller links that had rusted apart over the couple hundred years they laid there. It took heavy chains and well guided men and animals to move the granite blocks to make that foundation. Granite is heavy, weighing in at 165-190 pounds per cubic foot, so good tools and smart minds were always in order.
These links represent good gardening links to the world through the Internet. Like the strength of steel, Internet sites make us better gardeners. Miles to go, gardens to see, gardeners to meet. Read on!
George Africa, a Vermont Gardener!
