Camps, if you sat and looked at my fb page, you would see posts from relatives, school friends, dog forum friends, photographer friends and then the "info and ads" I follow a lot of garden companies, writes and botanical gardens. I enjoy admiring what they are doing even if it is something I can't grow or read. Plus the local and travel updates are interesting. There are a lot of companies that advertise, but I choose to either look or skip. I tend to post only generic or less personal things. I skip the political/religious stuff-kind of hard since I went to church school...lol I enjoy connecting with my friends and seeing what they are up too. No drunken party photos on my pages, cause if that is how that person lives, we have different lifestyles and that is not what I want to see. I also "hid" several people that are in to personal dramas-I deal with way too much of that at work so not about to add that in for fun. Like I said, you can use it as a tool and decide how you want to work with it

Yes, Glenda, aren't those rudbeckia outstanding? I'm going to plant a lot more for next year, and add a later planting so I will have some for later in the fall. They are already mostly cut and not coming back very fast. I put the tomatoes in the hoophouse because last summer was really chilly here and absolutely no one had ripe tomatoes until almost September. I pictured myself making a killing at the market this year. That didn't happen. This summer turned out to be a hot one and I didn't get the hoophouse up as soon as I should have. I had to vent the hoophouse in a big way almost every day and I didn't beat anybody to the market with tomatoes. Also, it turns out that I have a lot to learn about growing tomatoes. They look much better than they really are. The plants have been mostly healthy looking, but I've had a lot of blossom-end rot and some other disorder where the tomatoes develop slightly dark soft areas that get bigger as the tomato gets fully ripe. As a result I have had only four or five quarts of good tomatoes from all those plants. I'll do a better job of testing and preparing the soil next year, and hope for better yields. I added only a small handful of bonemeal to each planting hole this year. On the plus side, I've had no late blight or other nasty diseases, so I haven't done everything wrong. TM

Three years ago I got rid of all of my water-wasteful, labor intensive landscaping when I replaced my fence. I wanted to start an edible, sustainable, organic landscape from scratch. I love this idea and will be tracking the Facebook page daily for tips and ideas. My first project: planting a cover crop of hairy vetch to overwinter. I will till it into the very sandy soil in the spring and plant red, white, and sweet clovers mixed with field peas and soybeans. (I'm trying to improve my soil. I just had 10 yards of organic compost delivered and am working it into the top 6" of soil right now.) Any tips or ideas are most welcomed! Peace, love and tie dye! GO GIANTS!!!!

The reason you want thousands of non local hits on any blog is so it goes up in the search engines so that when someone Googles your farm name that is what comes up at the top of the first page of the search and not things unrelated to your blog. if your blog doesn't show up in the first 10 entries few to no people will ever find it through a search 9and that is how 95% of the readers will find your blog). So if you go only for local readers your blog may get 3 to 5 hits a week and over a year's time have maybe 10 regular readers-not effective marketing. the locally grown thing works only if there are several others in your area using it. There is no one around me using that software so it is useless to me unless i want to do all the marketing work getting people to use the software to buy from and than i have to deliver the goods to them, etc. Where this is established it works but it is a lot of work to set up a system in a new area. Facebook is a lot more flexible than a blog. they are two very different things-blogs allow you to tell your story in depth. FB allows you to do rapid updates that people will see as people are on FB for hours on end. But it is not easy to get real in depth and write say 500+ word updates on FB and have people read them. Facebook allows me to do actual business-I sell CSA shares over FB. I have never actually sold anything because of the blog. the blog is what gets people interested in the farm, though.