Blog Profiles: Home and Garden Blogs

Welcome to Blog Profiles. Each week, PR Newswire media relations manager Christine Cube selects an industry or subject and a handful of sites that do a good job with promoting, contributing, and blogging about the space. While Christine is on maternity leave, Mary Johnson will be filling in. Do you have a blog that deserves recognition? Tell us why on PR Newswire for Bloggers.

I was inspired recently to try my hand at gardening, and by inspired I mean I won a gift card to a local gardening establishment and went to Pinterest for ideas. My yard is horrible, but I do have several milk crates, so I embarked on my own version of Pin Win or Fail.

The blogs I picked to feature this week all have container gardening DIY tips and tutorials but, for the most part, gardening is just one feature of their blog. These bloggers focus on the home and projects to make life in our homes a little nicer. Also, I found all of these blogs from Pinterest. Who knew it wasn’t just for cake and quotes?

Gabrielle Blair is the Design Mom. In a nutshell, she is a designer, a mom to six kids, and leads the team of writers and creators that make up Design Mom. Her resume is pretty extensive and includes Website of the Year by Time Magazine, as well as top parenting blog by the Wall Street Journal, Parents Magazine and Better Homes & Gardens.

I found Design Mom by way of the pin for 7 Secrets for a Successful Container Garden, which covers everything from what you can use to grow a garden to the types of fertilizer that work best. There are also many great photos to drive home just how easy it is to garden in containers.

I also enjoyed Living with Kids House Tours featuring interviews from families in their home. I love playing voyeur to other people’s homes to get ideas for what I can do in my own home.

Follow Design Mom on Pinterest.

Ashley from It’s Fitting describes herself as “a little bit June Cleaver, a little bit Martha Stewart” as she documents her adventures in going green, growing vegetables and living the small town life.

I discovered her Pinterest pin on Milk Crate Planters and growing vegetables that can be moved out of the cold easily. Every blog I looked at, before Ashley’s, suggested painting the milk crates first to make them look uniform. So, I was grateful that not only did she not do that but she also did not suggest sewing weed block to fit the crate. Her directions are clear and easy.

In Gardening with Your Kids, she offers tips for how even the youngest future farmer can help. I also recommend checking out her recipe for Lemon-Scented Blueberry Muffins – I hope to find out if they smell as good as they look.

Follow It’s Fitting on Pinterest.

Far From Normal is written by Krista who shares her “adventures with family, food, fun, and a life lived happily outside the box.”

I came to Krista’s blog by way of How to Make a Milk Crate Garden’s pin on Pinterest. Her directions are straight forward with step-by-step photos that made this container gardening look easy.

Krista covers a lot on gardening and I learned the difference between marigold leaves and ragweed leaves so that I don’t accidently pull the wrong ones when I help my neighbor in her yard.

Since I found this blog, and all of the blogs featured today, through Pinterest (I swear I’m not their spokesperson), I had to read Grandma’s Recipe Box – The Original Pinterest.  It is a handwritten recipe box for recipes and more from her grandmother and great-grandmother. I wish I had something like this from my grandmother or mother but alas, I will just leave my daughter my Pinterest password.

Once I got down how to make a container garden, I moved on to what to plant and that is how I found Brown Thumb Mama.

Pam is the Brown Thumb Mama, a corporate writer by day who is married with two kids.  I know we would get along in real life because we both are avid readers, avoid housework, and blog after our day job has ended and the family has been nurtured. If that wasn’t enough, she and her husband own a comic book store, which I think my husband secretly wants to do too. It seems only natural I would take her advice on gardening.

Pam’s article on Five Best Container Vegetables was not what I was expecting – no tomatoes in this post! She also offers practical tips at the end of the article for container gardening. If you are looking into container gardening this is one to pin for later.

Besides learning the best way to freeze onions and how to dry jalapeno peppers, I also found Pam’s articles on bees and why they swarm as well as keeping bees in the city really interesting – not enough to start making honey in my back yard but enough to come back and see how she does.

Follow Brown Thumb Mama on Pinterest.

Now the big question – Is my container garden a Pinterest win or fail?

Only time will tell. Here’s to a happy and fruitful summer!

P.S. Ever wonder how we come up with ideas for our blog profiles? Our handy list of industries and subjects on PR Newswire for Journalists stays top of mind. If you’re a blogger or journalist looking for home and gardening news, let us know. We can customize a newsfeed for you on PR Newswire for Journalists.

Mary Johnson is the office manager in the PR Newswire Cleveland office. You can find her blogging at ineedaplaydate.com or oversharing on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter at @mryjhnsn.