Where garden bloggers meet

Garden bloggers at 2010 Buffalo Fling

After four successful years of Garden Bloggers Fling -- the annual meet-up of garden bloggers organized by volunteer hosts in cities across the U.S. -- the event has grown large enough to benefit from a central website and an advisory committee. Why? To provide general information about the Fling (its genesis and purpose, a schedule of future Flings, sponsor information, etc.), to provide a centralized record of each Fling, and to help each year's organizers build on the previous year's successes.

To that end, the former and future planners have, over the course of a few email discussions, formed a small advisory committee: Pam Penick (Austin), Diana Kirby (Austin), and Elizabeth Licata (Buffalo). We're setting up this blog for general Fling information and also for any future planners to use, if they wish (rather than having to create their own site each year -- reinventing the wheel, as it were). We hope you'll subscribe or add it to your feed reader in order to keep up with the latest news.

We'll also be communicating with the garden blogging community on the Facebook page for Garden Bloggers Fling. Soon we'll be posting a survey to find out what you like about any Flings you've attended and/or what you'd like to see at future events.

We love the unique local energy brought to each of the previous Flings and don’t want to impose any bureaucratic structure or rules to what has been a wonderful, organic experience from year to year. However, it’s also an enormous amount of work to host the Fling, and our goal is simply to share some economies of scale, provide some planning and management advice, and gather input from participants about what makes a Fling fabulous.

We hope you'll join us in making the Fling even better each year!

Pam Penick - Digging

Diana Kirby - Sharing Nature's Garden

Elizabeth Licata - Gardening While Intoxicated and Garden Rant