Coming Next Week On Gardenaut

Things are about to get busy here at Gardenaut, so we thought we'd round up some announcements for those of you who have been patiently waiting to see what exactly this blog is going to take on. What you see here are the seeds for what we hope will be a very productive blog for everyone involved!

Gardenauts
We now have nine contributing gardeners lined up who will be reporting weekly on their gardening efforts. You'll start seeing their posts on Saturday - each day a new gardener from a new region will be introducing you to how and what they do in the garden. You will then be able to follow their progress and share in their successes and squirrel raids throughout the season, and we hope you'll chime in with tips or advice for them. We have been fairly quiet since our launch with just a few project posts but things are about to get pretty busy pretty quickly!

Share your photos
We have also established a Gardenauts Flickr group that is already seeing some great activity in its photo pool. The group is open to anyone to submit their gardening photos - all we ask is you include some details about what's happening in them, so that others can learn from what they see. We will be working on some interesting ways to feed these photos into the blog and open up creative lines of communication between these communities as they grow.

Looking for a few more gardeners
As I look at our map of contributors (it's in the right sidebar of the blog) it's obvious that we could really use someone in upper New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine) and the Southwest is a huge gap for us still (any New Mexico gardeners out there? Drought-tolerant gardening or short-season gardening makes for great reading!) and we'd love to have someone in the very long-season areas of California - SoCal west of the mountains, like Santa Barbara, San Diego, Los Angeles. A full crew here might then look more like 12 blogging gardeners, including ourselves - from our homestead we'll be focusing on projects, tips and reviews as we're fortunate enough to have an Austin gardener representing our home state.

If you spend any time on gardening forums or have a blog of your own, we'd love to have you help spread the word about those last slots we need to fill to have a national quorum of guest contributors.

What do you think?
We are experimenting here (can you tell?), and we have a bit of time before a larger audience starts defining what we do, so if you have any ideas about where we're headed and what other smart technologies and strategies we could build into this project, let us know either in comments or by emailing us at zrecommends (at) gmail (dot) com. We're also still casting about for a catchy name for this project, so suggestions are welcome. Put on your thinking caps, and happy gardening!