New Lens About Giverny!

The new lens is Flowers of Giverny, Flowers that Monet Grew

Latest Lenses, Updated Lenses

It is all about improvement

Working through the stubs of new lenses I finished and published Ilona's Garden Shed which is a lens highlighting my Cafepress store. The idea came from the posts that others had made on utilizing Squidoo to work with Zazzle and Cafepress. It has spurred me to develop my understanding of Cafepress and to try and get the store going like the Zazzle store has this year. I hope to improve my, and the readers, grasp of how to use Cafepress to make some income.

Landscaping 101 is a new lens under the gardening topic. Home improvement should include a basic knowledge of how to care for your landscape... so this lens is a starter for that pursuit. Color in Your Garden is another general garden topic, newly published. It concentrates on the use of foliage along with flowers for garden color.

I have been trying to improve older lenses and those improvements have lead to raising some nominal lenses from the red zone. Squidoo has new filters working to weed out duplicate content, so more attribution links are needed to identify quotes, etc. They are overly strict in some respects, but the way to avoid being unpublished is to link to another source of the information. I put source links in the Women's Gift Suggestions and it improved ranking  right away.

Some content has been edited for clarity and in the case of 'About Ilona's Garden' Lens I removed some peripheral content to create a new lens that I hope to publish soon.

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I have leveled up to 65 and won a new trophy for 500 SquidAngel blessings given out.  When I went to Atlanta, my momentum was thrown off and I am behind in recording blessings given me. Maybe I can play catchup later this summer? These are the big news events at my Squidoo diversions for now.

Two New Additions To The Garden

The garden of Squidoo, that is. I finished two of the garden topic lenses that I had begun, and they are now waiting to appear above the red horizon.  Both are lenses that will grow over the coming year because their range is quite wide.

Ornamental Garden Trees begins by covering crabapples, Northern magnolias, and flowering cherries. There is more to add about Japanese maples, redbud, and fringe trees. At least that is the next phase planned for this lens.

Landscape 101 is a lens that I perceived was needed on the Squidoo board of lenses. It is a general topic, but one that can be honed into helping a homeowner plan their home landscape. This one I think will find the next phase is adding the most helpful of other lensmasters lenses, through the featured lens module, to the base of my content .

Enjoy the new lenses!
Grow Fragrant Lavender saw a little pop of interest due to the National Fragrance Day Quest...Thanks Squidoo HQ :)

Front Page Features

Some of my lenses have been featured on the front page, and it makes a lot of difference in the traffic and amount of likes and comments. The front page photos are best as square shapes, so I have slowly been changing over all my lens' intro photos.

These are the lenses I am getting lots of activity on ( even the new lenses)

The Quaint Cottage Garden

10 Best Perennial Flowers

Fragrant Lavender

Alpine Strawberries


I have one that dropped into the WIP again, Christmas Knit Sweaters.
One brand new lens that doesn't want to rise out of red nether land:
Martha Stewart Green It is a color lens that goes with the diy lenses.

And that is it for this week, so far.

The Year For Prairie Plants

Now that I've researched more on Prairie plants, and written more about them, I think it is high time to focus more attention on these great plants for American gardens.

Here is my collection of Prairie garden articles, including a new lens for prairie plants:
A Prairie Garden
New American Garden Style
Prairie Plants for Your Garden


...and they play a large part in the list of 10 Great Perennial Plants.
It was time to create more lenses about my area of expertise, which is gardening in the Midwest. As an aside... I started a little prairie patch of garden in my front yard a couple years ago- it was a good decision and I'm very happy how it melds with the rural landscape here. The perfect bit of garden for an old farmhouse like mine.

Mostly I Write About Gardens

Although this blog is for Squidoo related posts, my main occupation is to write for my garden website. Of course, I get all enthused about something and spend loads of time on it, like making lots of lenses and try to get lensrank to move higher, but in the ed my main writing efforts tend to be garden articles.

That said, here is what I've written recently:
12 Bright Midsummer Perennial Bloomers

How to Use Dwarf Hinoki Cypress in Landscaping

When to prune a mugo pine

Besides the lenses ( I'm now up to 46 published ones, with more in the works), I won't be able to keep up the pace, but I'm writing like a house afire lately.

For Cottage Garden Lovers

I created a new lens on Squidoo! Adding to the garden series this one is all about Quaint Cottage Gardens, the traditional type of garden we all think of when we think about a yard full of flowers with a little garden gate, a primrose path, and an arbor of roses. While so many of us love this style of garden, I ask the question in the lens..."Is this the garden for you?"

I was also busy on Ilona's Garden, writing about brightly colored midsummer blooms. I chose twelve that I think are outstanding for garden color, ease of cultivation, and usefulness. You can see I've been busy making webpages!

My lenses have, however, dropped back down to 0-2 visits. That is a challenge: keeping visitors coming.