We’ve had wonderful weather in NC this October—not even a brief visit from Jack Frost yet. Our cole crops (kale, broccoli, collards) are coming along very well. The late fall broccoli is already showing florets. And the beautiful kaylettes (cross between brussels and kale) have numerous little florets up and down the stem. The Swiss chard which is so good in green smoothies (a.k.a. “green juice”) Is abundant and beautiful. We’re also still harvesting cucamelons… loving those little gems! Definitely a must plant each year crop for us. Oh!… and Jerusalem artichokes!

We've removed all the old tomato plants from the big tomato cage, leveled out the composted straw, applied some new soil and compost, and set in a new plantings of late fall / early winter broccoli. When Mr. Frost arrives, we’ll be covering the rows with a heavier grade of fabric. Last year, we had broccoli in late winter.



If you’d like to share more about what you’re doing… recipes… photos, etc., we love to hear about it! If you'd like to share with others, we can even publish it on GardensAll site and Facebook. So just send us a note! 

Next we’re sharing things we don’t normally share. Not sure how many of you will be interested in hearing this, so please let us know either way, whether or not you’d like to see/hear more of this kind of thing and we’ll include more when it’s relevant. 

WE’RE ON A MISSION:

• “To empower the individual.” 
  
• “To strengthen families.”
  
• "To place the power with the people.”
  

Here’s the thing: in today’s online world, there’s a LOT of great info “out there”… and a lot of junk, shallow, inaccurate information written by writers who are not actually doing the work of the thing they’re writing about.

We’ve learned all about this industry and discovered more and more about how deep this derivative work goes after getting into the online world, and after buying the GardensAll site in 12/12/15. It turns out that we bought a site that had over 1,000 articles, many of which had to be deleted! :-O 

We had to remove the majority of those because they were curated from other sites, many of whom had curated them from other sites. Sometimes that chain of derivates goes back several times before finding the source and most of those were poorly written, of little value and/or not even accurate. Lesson learned… we should’ve done better due diligence. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. Meanwhile, what we’ve learned has fueled our mission.


We’re all for research for learning and sometimes writing from that perspective to share what we’re learning. We have to do this sometimes too, and as we learn about something we want to share it with you. Like our research on air fryers featured in this newsletter. A friend has one, raves about it so we’re sharing our research on it as we look into getting one for ourselves and as a possible Christmas gift for our mom. We’re also in favor of folks finding ways to earn money online. Our own approach is harder in that regard as we’re not doing what others are doing. We’re trying to make a go of it by creating the kind of reader experience we would also enjoy. We’ve always followed our heart and principles in these things… over the “smart” approach used by the majority. We’re not at all against profit and capitalism. We just have to feel good about the method of arriving at that.

If you’ve ever been annoyed and frustrated with the proliferation of ads and spammy clickbait on other websites… the double underlined text words that lead to things completely unrelated to the article topic… the videos that auto-play and can’t be found to be turned off… well those sites have to do that for survival. They have staff to pay and that’s how they do it. Our way is not the way to wealth because all those annoying clickbait things pay so much more than the few ads we place. We spend a lot of time researching and placing the Amazon links to specific products where relevant to help you find things that might be useful. So while their way pays the bills it doesn’t represent our values.

There's also a huge segment of websites that are created to earn money using all the latest marketing tactics in addition to the above mentioned ads. They have paid writers, the majority of whom are not actually doing what it is they’re writing about. These site owners decide to create sites in a niche that has monetization potential. Sometimes it’s in an area of interest, but that’s less common. Probably something like the 80/20 rule.

So again, we're not against those folks earning a living. It's still honest work. But we see in this GardensAll community a vast wealth of knowledge and experience from folks in the garden… doing the real thing. That’s what the world needs more of real experience from real folks doing real things: your wisdom!


OUR GOALS with GARDENS ALL… TO:

• “Be of the people for the people.”
  
• “Be all about gardening from gardeners.”
  
• “Encourage, serve and empower gardeners to grow more and better."
  
• “Be your garden gathering place, where [virtual] neighbors help neighbors.”

Let us know what you need… what you’d like to see more of and how else we may serve you, and if you like to write and share… we’d love to publish you!

- The Gardens All Team