A lazy million

Although our backyard garden blog takes place in the middle of a rather large city, I’ve always thought of Garden Amateur Land as a quiet country town. Maybe it’s not even that big. We're more like a village. It’s pretty quiet around here most of the time (if you don’t count the planes occasionally passing overhead …)

So today, it’s quite a big occasion for our little green backwater, because our blog has just had its millionth hit!

Mind you, it’s taken a while. Garden Amateur began way back in June 2008, and has been chugging along, with a couple of holidays here and there, ever since then. And today’s celebratory effort is our 620th Garden Amateur posting.

Compared to some truly busy “great metropolis” news websites, which can record a million hits in less than an hour, and even popular city-sized gardening blogs, which probably do a million a week (I’m just guessing), our quiet village-sized blog sees a few hundred hits per day most days, a lot of them sent here by search engines looking for solutions to gardening problems, rather than people thinking "I wonder how Pam and Jamie are doing. Must go check on them."

So, purely to mark the occasion, here’s a rundown on what has proved most popular over the first million hits.

Our greatest hit? The post on growing murrayas in Sydney, called “Too Easy”, is the all-time champion. I posted it back in February 2009 and I’m still getting emails from people who seemingly don’t bother to read the comments/answers, because about 90 per cent of them ask the same questions already answered by me several times before in the same comments section. So far it has had over 43,500 page views, and each day adds some more.

Second-placegetter is “Harvesting Coriander Seed”, another 2009 classic, with a flavour-filled 26,000+ views to date. Other practical postings on riveting topics such as powdery mildew, organic fruit fly controls and growing and harvesting rocket also have had several thousand viewers each, so I hope they have been of help to a few gardening folk.

Proving that a totally misleading heading can work wonders to your stats, if not your self-esteem, our ninth most popular posting is one from our epic 2011 Drive Across America series of holiday blog postings, that took up all of September/October/November that year. It wasn’t even one of the better postings from that trip, its popularity was all down to its song title heading “Getting Our Kicks on Route 66”. And so five thousand people no doubt have been thoroughly disappointed when their search engine took them to Pam and Jamie’s driving holiday, and not to Rock n Roll heaven. Bet you they didn’t stay long here, either.

And so it’s on to our next million, which will probably take another eight years! 

Thank you to everyone who has ever visited our blog, and an even bigger thankyou to all the kind folk who have left a comment either on this blog page or via their email subscription to the blog.

I always think of receiving feedback as being given a little posy of flowers, no matter if the comments are positive or not.

In fact, thinking of posies good and bad, it makes me think of an old joke a friend of my father liked to tell, of the man who named his three daughters after flowers: Rose, Petunia and Snapdragon.

Bye till next time!