blog – The Gardening Blog

Setting up a new blog is indeed quite a challenge for me. First you have to decide what you want to do with your blog, then there is the choice of blogging software, then you need a theme (design) and then you need to set it all up and add some blog posts to get it going.

For this blog I chose to use wordpress (only because I know it faily well, but it is still a challenge for a techno-phobe like myself to set it all up, not to forget that I am quite a dinosaur in age compared to those that do this well and quickly!). The installation and set up is all fairly simple, it’s the more intricate details that get to me.

But I have it set up now and hope this will give us many hours of blogging satisfation in the future …

PS: This serves as a test post – we will delete it eventually once we have a few more posts going.

A life-time of friendship is indeed very, very special. Anyone who has one will agree – there is nothing quite like having a very best friend that really knows you through and through, has been witness to all your life’s successes and failures, been with you through the ups and downs and remains … your best friend! I consider myself very fortunate to have such a friend in Barbie.

We’ve been friends since as long as I can remember, but we’ve only recently become “gardeners”. The idea for this blog came to me after a conversation we had on New Years Day (2011). Barbie and I have always had the ability to spend hour upon hour with each other, talking non-stop. We never seem to run out of things to talk about. But back to my inspiration … Barbie told me that after one of our recent marathon “talk sessions”, her hubby Hannes asked her “what do you talk about for so long …” and she realised that we now spend a lot of time discussing our gardens. So the idea for this blog developed from that conversation.

We both live in the Western Cape – I live in the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town and Barbie lives in the village of Philadelphia near the Cape West Coast (just before Malmesbury). It’s about a 45 – 50 minute drive from here and as we are both busy with our businesses and families I don’t get to see her garden as often as I would like. We thought this blog would be a great way to share our gardening experiences with each other by uploading photographs and posting our latest “gardening news”. It will be fun to see how our gardens develop and progress over time!

PS: I chose the “sunflowers” photograph for this first post as a symbolic photo – two sunflowers – that’s me and Barbs (I’m the one of the left, she’s on the right, that’s because she’s taller than me!)