Gardening is a private activity – usually done at home by individuals – but it’s also an interest that brings people together, either to buy plants, share knowledge or simply socialize with others who appreciate the sanity (and stress at times) from tending plants. There are many communities of gardeners across Canada – in small towns, rural areas, big cities – and many areas of focus from herbs to peonies to urban forests. In order to provide information about events that might interest people interested in gardening, we provide online listings, now organized by province as well as by group. As of March 31, we’ve had almost 600 events submitted in 2019.
We’ve received some good suggestions this year about how to improve the form used to submit an event. And we’re making changes following some helpful comments about making it easier to scan the emails that we send out about events. The emails are sent by province every Friday to people who have requested them. Above is a sample of an email about events in British Columbia.
We view this as a public service, so the listings are free for Master Gardener groups, horticultural societies, botanical gardens and other gardening-related local groups. We welcome new listings of your Seedy Saturdays, plant sales, garden tours and more. If a business is an advertiser, then we let them publish some events. After all, it is income from advertising that allows us to maintain the website.
People looking for gardening information often do a web search, and end up on the Garden Making website. Then they look around at all of our content, see the event listings, and as a result end up connecting with other people in their area. Several people have emailed me to say that their groups attract new members because of our events listings.
We also are now listing local plant sales and the local garden tours in one list because people do travel to other areas and may want to check to see if there will be some gardening activity happening where they’re headed.