Finally Updating my Garden Blog Blogroll

This is my 2nd year writing at Garden Desk. It's funny to think about this, but a year ago I remember saying to myself "I wonder if there are many other garden related blogs out there". At that time I only knew of a few! I read Veggie Gardening Tips, Compost Bin and May Dreams Gardens and that was about it. In the beginning, as I would find more blogs that I enjoyed, I would add a link to them in my sidebar. As the months went on and I began to realize that there are many many good gardening blogs, I slacked off on adding the links.

Recently I became convicted of this. I would visit a blog I haven't read before and see that they had already added Garden Desk to their blogroll. Wow! I realized that I wasn't returning the favor and I had no valid reason for this. Then I said to myself "I hope all of these great bloggers don't think that since I don't have a link to their blogs, that I don't link to them."

I have recently gone through all of my bookmarks and rss readers and compiled a true list of the garden blogs that I read. I'm sure I have missed some and I'm sure that there are still good garden blogs out there that I have yet to discover.

So to anyone reading this who owns a blog and who have linked to GardenDesk or Veggie Garden Info, I thank you. I hope that your blog now shows up on my list. If not, let me know and I will try to include it. I have cleared away space in the sidebar to accommodate a pretty long list. If it gets too long, maybe I can figure out how to make a scrollable list like Playing in the Dirt's Green Thumb Blogger list.

It amazes me that there are sooooo many gardening blogs out there, but what really amazes me is that there are so many really good ones. I love learning from other gardeners, so if you have a good blog that's not on my list, I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks, and happy garden blogging!

More Heirloom Tomato Discussion

Tomatoes are fantastic! They are always worth writing about. They are always worth discussing, especially if you are discussing heirloom tomatoes.

If you have visited this site before, you know that I am overly excited about trying new heirloom tomato varieties this year.

Last year I wrote about my observations on growing heirloom tomatoes. I listed the pros and the cons as I see them. You can read it here, but the quick version is that compared to hybrids, heirloom tomatoes can be more flavorful, more interesting and have a sense of heritage or history behind them. Unfortunately for many gardeners, they also are more susceptible to disease and pests and can have lower yields.

Well it seems that Patrick from Bifurcated Carrots disagrees with me. He wrote an interesting post refuting my observations. I have to say however, that he was very polite in his disagreement. Patrick is a gentleman. He is also very knowledgeable about vegetable gardening, so if Patrick writes that you're wrong about something, then it should be carefully read and considered. If you are interested in heirloom tomatoes, you should read Patrick's post.

He brings up some interesting points. One of which that I had not thought of before is that heirloom varieties by the same name sold by different companies are not equal. He explains how a variety needs to be "grown out" to perpetuate the desirable qualities of a variety. This means that as we gardeners read about which varieties work for others and which ones don't, it never means that we can expect the same results in our garden.

It is fun to find out what varieties others like, but maybe we should be focusing more on where they got the seed that worked well for them (and where the seed came from that didn't work).

So am I right or wrong about the pros and cons of heirloom tomatoes? I would have to say yes. The point is that gardening is a great activity. Writing about it is also great. We garden bloggers should continue to report on our observations about our gardening but beware over-generalizing - about tomatoes or anything else.

Most of all though, we should continue to experiment in our gardens and document things. We should continue to read from good sites like Bifurcated Carrots, and we should continue discussing things that we are interested in. Most of all, we should continue discussing heirloom tomatoes!