It can be lonely blogging about gardening in the Reno-Sparks area. especially now that Jake at A Northern Nevada Garden is leaving the state.

I found a partial solution a couple of weeks ago after a Las Vegas gardener commented here. I visited her site and decided to follow her on Twitter. She followed me back, and the next thing I knew all kinds of gardening people were following me, too. I started following some of them, and then one of them tweeted about a Blotanical contest winner.

That led me to a gardening blogger social network called, of course, Blotanical. Set up by an Australian gardener, the site is a community of more than a thousand garden bloggers from all over the world. The first thing I did was look for blogs in Nevada, and I found several in Southern Nevada and one in Silver Springs, High Desert Gardening, which I'd never known existed. I signed up.

Of course, that was all it took for me to be slammed with work. Just when I wanted to make a good impression on all the new visitors to the blog, I didn't have time to update it. Besides, being a member of Blotanical raises the bar for me. Judging from the visits I've made to other members' blogs, all garden blogs have to be filled with beautiful pictures. And here I've sat with three text-only entries at the top of my page for a couple of weeks.

I'm still finding my way around Blotanical, but I like it so far. Several members, including one from Japan and one from Italy, went out of their way to welcome me personally, and some have visited and commented on my blog. I used the directory to find a blog in my parents' hometown in Wisconsin that I think I'll follow because of the nostalgia and because the gardener photographs the critters that visit her yard, too. I also found a Colorado blog that I'm following because I think the growing conditions are similar there and I like the blogger's attitude.

You can use Blotanical's blog directory without joining, and you can join whether you write a blog or not.

Oh, I almost forgot the picture at the top of this entry. As I said, I feel as if I really need to include a photo with every post now, so I dug into a 2006 file and pulled out that one of the crabapple tree at the end of the season. The birds enjoy the fruits all winter.