2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,600 times in 2010. That’s about 9 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 23 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 72 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 10mb. That’s about a picture per week.

The busiest day of the year was October 5th with 63 views.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were digg.com, slashingtongue.com, en.wordpress.com, google.co.nz, and legal5ounds.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for haemanthus, aspidistra, haemanthus coccineus, vireya rhododendron, and dwarf citrus trees nz.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Contact Us February 2010

2

Citrus Notes July 2010

3

My Favourite Plants – February – Haemanthus and Scadoxus February 2010

4

About January 2010

5

Vireyas February 2010

Trees For Tomorrow all go!

What a lot of changes in such a short time. We are now officially www.treesfortomorrow.co.nz, business cards should be coming this week and advertising in our local paper starts this Thursday.  Well done us. 

We are only going to be open to the public on three days each week, Fri-Sun, but hopefully the customers will be rolling in once word spreads about our beautiful plants and great prices.

I want to let New Zealand readers know about a really handy site that I use – www.gardengrow.co.nz.  You can go onto their site and register for a planting reminder.  You choose what planting zone you live in and the frequency of reminders and you will receive in your email a list of all of  things that you can plant at that time, how to sow and when you will reap the harvesting rewards.   I find it really handy, and with the list often I see something that I hadn’ t thought about putting it until then.  Well worth checking them out.

Big plans for this weekend.  As well as getting the nursery ready for visitors, I have lots of lovely photos to share.  Also I want to get some notes written on this site about Citrus plants, right now is the ideal time to get them in.

Back To Blogging

Well, shame on me, I have been a bad blogger, not posting for many a month.  With changes afoot in the nursery I feel my energy renewed.   This blog will be moving to our own domain name: www.treesfortomorrow.co.nz.  Hopefully, this will give us a more professional image.  We are going to be opening the nursery to the public for three days each week, beginning next weekend. 

More soon…

Important Kitten Update

Regular readers will know that we had to get a new kitten as our old cat died.  So we did.  But our older cat, RedRed, refused to co-operate and frolic with it, fair enough.  Instead of glee and frolic, there was hissing and suspicion which has, thankfully, lessened into total ambivalence.  She knows it’s there, she’s not sure if she likes it, but she seems quite happy just to ignore him and go about her daily business.  Typical cat.

But the kitten, Mustard, seemed lonely.  Plus, he required us to frolic with him which was great, for a couple of weeks, as frolicking with a kitten takes a lot more time than one would expect.  So a plan was hatched to get the kitten a kitten.  So we did.  He is super-cute, bless his little self.

So that’s a happy ending.  Mustard loves his new kitten.  He is rather smaller and quite easy to lose in the house and currently I have no idea where he is.  He is only 6 weeks old, and weighs in at a rather puny 600 grams to Mustard’s 1.5 kilos.  Which makes some of the frolicking rather one-sided.  But he is sure to grow.

More Hoya Photographs

Here are two more of our hoyas.  They’ve done so well this year. I really love the Hoya minibelle.  It is a very smart looking plant with long thin leaves, it’s a really good variety for a hanging basket and it gets covered in cute umbels of small flowers.  

Hoya minbelle

We have a large plant of Hoya obovata and this season it was just covered in long lines of flowers.  The leaves on obovata are lovely as well, very rounded, with the grey flecks that a lot of different hoyas have.

Hoya obovata

Obovata Plant

 

Welcome

Great, so I managed to get a few things sorted for the blog.  Nice photo header if I do say so myself.  Well we have had a good start to the year.  The nursery has had a MAJOR sort out over the summer and is looking fabulous.  We have been open to the public only by appointment until now but intend opening 5 days a week, Wednesday to Sunday from the beginning of March.

Our hoyas have had a fantastic flowering season.  A few that had not flowered before such as the Hoya pubicalyx c.v. “Royal Hawaiian Purple”  have done so and what a beauty that particular one is.  Can I get a photo below?  I’ll give it a go.

Hoya pubicalyx c.v. Royal Hawaiian Purple

Ok success, that was easier than I thought it might be.  We had a lovely visit from a gardening group on the 10th of January and were encouraged by their enthusiasm.  Thanks for coming guys, the hoyas were in full display and we hope that you enjoy the plants that you took away with you.

Well that’s my first proper post, hope that someone gets a chance to read it.  I have lots of lovely photos from the summer flowering season so have plenty to post in the future.  Enjoy your day!

Getting Started

Ok, so new year, new blog.  Just entering something here and having a fiddle with all of the setting to get it looking nice and fancy.  Stay tuned!