Author Archives:

Book filled with ‘Passalong’ recipes, garden tips

LSU Hilltop Arboretum’s Hodge Podge Nursery volunteers are more than enthusiastic gardeners. They are pretty good cooks, too, and it’s that skill that shines in their new self-published, fundraiser cookbook, “Passalong Recipes From the Podge” ($20 including tax, paperback).

On Wednesdays, the volunteers show up early to work at Hilltop’s on-site nursery at 11855 Highland Road, Baton Rouge, then break for a potluck lunch. “There is always something different,” volunteer Marion Drummond said at a recent lunch. “But when there’s no dessert, you’ve never heard such crying,” laughed Helen Levy. “So the next time, everyone will bring desserts and there are no vegetables.”

The 176-page cookbook, edited by Lisa Parker, with help from Pam Sulzer, Maradee Cryer, Susie Cortello, Janet Forbes and Paula Dillemuth, grew out of those lunches, said Peggy Davis Coates, also a cookbook committee member. The book is the brainchild of Parker, who also formatted the book’s layout while in the process of moving to California, Coates said.

The book features a collection of the volunteers’ favorite recipes for appetizers, soups, sandwiches, salads, main dishes, vegetables, sweets of all types, breads and beverages. It includes color photographs, quotes, garden tips and stories passed along by Hodge Podge Nursey fans.

Among the recipes are Nutty Party Mix; Shrimp and Corn Soup; Spinach Tuscan Torta; Yehudi Menuhin’s Eggplant Casserole; Corn, Poblanos Onions; Denise’s Blueberry Buckle; Donna’s Pumpkin Pecan Pie; Baklava; Santa Fe Squares; and Bourbon St. Milkshake.

Each chapter opens with a typical plant label used for plant sales and features the favorite flowering plants of Emory Smith, a retired postal worker with a passion for native Louisiana plants who in 1981 donated the 14-acre Hilltop nature preserve to LSU. Smith always encouraged the sharing of plants, and Hilltop’s on-site nursery is an outgrowth of Smith’s philosophy, the book says.

Hodge Podge has grown to an all-volunteer, small, nursery operation with more than 6,000 plants representing more than 600 species.

The cookbook will be on sale at Hilltop’s PlantFest! Oct. 6-7 and during its Fall Garden Tour from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Oct. 28. It also is available by calling the Hilltop Garden Book and Nature Shop at (225) 767-6916 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday or by emailing hilltop@tigers.lsu.edu or checking the website htt://www.lsu.edu/hilltop.

Book signing, dinner in N.O.

The Link Restaurant Group will host a book signing and dinner Oct. 10 at its private event facility, Calcasieu, 930 Tchoupitoulas St., New Orleans, to benefit the nonprofit St. Bernard Project.

Chef Stephen Stryjewski, of Cochon and Cochon Butcher in New Orleans and Cochon Lafayette, will host the event to introduce the new edition of John Martin Taylor’s “Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking.” Tickets to the dinner are $100 per person and include a signed copy of the cookbook and a bag of Hoppin’ John’s stone-ground grits. For reservations, call (504) 588-2188.

In celebration of the cookbook’s 20th anniversary, the University of North Carolina Press has released a new edition with 250 updated recipes. Taylor, a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, is considered an authority on the culinary history of the South and the cooking of the coastal plain that surrounds Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, Ga. Stryjewski will prepare a three-course meal featuring recipes from Taylor’s cookbook; Taylor will discuss his book, travels and most memorable meals.

The St. Bernard Project is a rebuilding, nonprofit organization with a mission “to remove physical, mental and emotional barriers for vulnerable families, senior citizens and disabled residents who are struggling to recover from the devastation and trauma caused by Hurricane Katrina and the oil spill,” a press release said. For more information about the project, go to http://www.stbernardproject.org.

Cheramie Sonnier is The Advocate’s Food editor. Her email address is csonnier@theadvocate.com.

Tips for covering flowering bulbs, harvesting squash

Leave a reply

It’s prime time to plant tulips and other spring blooming bulbs, but if squirrels frequent your garden, you are undoubtedly aware of how difficult it is to keep those varmints from digging up and eating the bulbs. In the past I often recommended planting the bulbs surrounded by chicken wire or hardware cloth. Now there’s a new way to protect bulbs that is much easier and just as effective.

Dig the hole and plant the bulb as you normally would, but instead of caging it, cover the bulb with poultry grit, which is made up of crushed granite, shale, or oyster shells, and is available at feed stores and some hardware stores. The squirrels don’t like trying to dig through the sharp grit and quickly give up.

Unfortunately, if the squirrels do what they did at my house and exact revenge by eating the flower buds right when they emerge from the soil, there are only two effective control methods. Either plant one of the many types of spring blooming bulbs that squirrels won’t eat such as Chionodoxa, snowdrops, Daffodils, hyacinth and Fritillaria, or adopt a wiener dog to patrol your garden.

Harvest your winter squash

To store well and develop sweet flavor, winter squash must be allowed to fully ripen on the vine. At the same time, however, freezing temperatures can harm the fruit, so it must be picked before the first frost. It can be a bit tricky to know when a winter squash is ripe.

Usually the first sign that it’s time to harvest is that the vines begin to dry out. Another sign is that the fruit turns color. For instance ‘Spaghetti’ squash turns tan, or yellow, ‘Delicata’ usually turns cream colored with dark stripes and ‘Butter Cup’ squash usually turn dark green with silvery or golden striping.

Once it colors up, test to make sure the rind has hardened sufficiently by applying pressure to the skin, if it doesn’t yield to a bit of pressure it’s time to harvest. When harvesting, use pruners to cut it and leave a few inches of stem on the fruit. Leaving a shorter stem will cause the fruit to rot.

Most winter squash need to be cured by keeping them in 70-degree temperatures for 15 days before storing them in a cool dry place.

Delicata and acorn squash don’t need curing. Simply store them cool and dry and you’ll be enjoying delicious squash all winter long.

Manure never smelled

so good!

Improve production in your vegetable garden by sowing a fall cover crop, commonly referred to as “green manure” before mid-October. Fall cover crops usually consist of legumes such as winter peas, fava beans, clovers or vetches. They germinate and grow quickly enough to form a protective ground cover before winter freezes set in, yet not so fast as to harm late season, or overwintering vegetable crops.

Cover crops protect and improve the soil in several ways. The thick foliage prevents pounding winter rains from compacting the soil surface and leaching out nutrients, while choking out winter and late spring weeds. At the same time it forms an aggressive root system that breaks up and aerates hard soil.

Most important, especially when sowed with an inoculant (available at nurseries) members of the pea family used as a cover crop host special fungus that collect nutrients and make them available for vegetable-crop growth. In spring, simply turn the cover crop into the soil. If you are going to sow a fall cover crop, don’t delay. Seeds germinate best when soil temperatures are in the 50 to 60 degree range.

Ciscoe Morris: ciscoe@ciscoe.com; “Gardening with Ciscoe” airs at 10 a.m. Saturdays on KING-TV

Garden tips as cold temperatures loom – KBOI

Leave a reply

BOISE, Idaho (KBOI) – It’s about to get cold outside.

Overnight temperatures could approach freezing for the first time this season. And, if you’ve been gardening, there are a couple things you need to do if you want to keep your plans growing in this cooler weather.

Flowers are are susceptible to frosty temperatures so if you want to keep their colors vibrant for a few more weeks you should cover them with a frost blanket or a row cover for the next couple of nights.

Some vegetables, especially tomatoes, taste awful if they are left growing on the vine during a freeze.

“I’m going to go home and pick all my red tomatoes tonight for sure,” said Amber Garden, Zamzows greenhouse manager. “I’m also going to just go through and pick all the cucumbers I can. But I am going to hope that those green tomatoes will still turn red. I think we have some time.”

Leaving the green tomatoes on the vine is a good idea because there is a chance that parts of the Treasure Valley won’t quite reach 32 degrees and if you lose them, they weren’t ready anyway.

Other vegetables can keep right on growing because they aren’t sensitive to quick periods of freezing temperatures.

“Things that aren’t are your lettuce, your radishes and your cold crop kind of things like broccoli and things. So you don’t need to worry about those so much, but tomatoes and peppers for sure.”

Innisfree Garden joins list of endangered spaces

Leave a reply

<!–Saxotech Paragraph Count: 2
–>

WASHINGTON — Innisfree Garden in Millbrook joins Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, sometimes called “America’s Main Street,” on a list among the nation’s endangered landscapes because of neglect and deferred maintenance by the National Park Service.

Innisfree is a 150-acre public garden that was created as an American, Modernist twist on ancient Chinese landscape design. Funding shortfalls threaten its preservation.

The grand avenue connecting the Capitol and White House is slowly falling into disrepair, the nonprofit Cultural Landscape Foundation told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Water fountains rarely function, benches are broken and some trees have been removed.

In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy called for a revitalization of Pennsylvania Avenue. Improvements included the creation of small parks designed by top landscape architects, including M. Paul Friedberg and Carol Johnson. But they haven’t been maintained.

“There really is this kind of very slow downward spiral that is happening,” said Charles Birnbaum, the group’s founding president.

Except for part of the road that was redesigned as a pedestrian plaza in 2004 for security in front of the White House, “the lion’s share of the 1.2-mile stretch hasn’t been renewed,” Birnbaum said.

National Mall Superintendent Robert Vogel said in an emailed statement that the park service is working on ways to preserve and restore Pennsylvania Avenue, though he did not elaborate.

“We welcome the interest and support of the Cultural Landscape Foundation and the attention they can bring to this effort,” he said.

The Washington-based foundation, created in 1998, aims to educate people about historic landscapes through training programs, partnering with local groups and publicity for at-risk spaces. It has a track record of saving threatened landscapes by raising awareness with its annual Landslide listing.

Eleven other sites being added to the group’s Landslide 2012 list, which will be announced Thursday at an event with New York’s Central Park Conservancy. They include Los Angeles’ Hannah Carter Japanese Garden, Nasher Sculpture Garden in Dallas and New York’s Jones Beach, a public beach and park designed by Robert Moses in the 1920s that continues to draw 6 million to 8 million visitors each year.

Give your fall garden beauty that never fades

Leave a reply

It’s that time of year again. The summer garden’s bright blooms and easy vibrancy are fading into fall. In many Northwest gardens, that means the beginning of a long season of brown, mushy twigs.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

“The fall component to a garden is just as important,” said landscape designer Heidi Skievaski and owner of Sublime Garden Design in Snohomish.

Too often landscapes are missing the structure — the paths, pergolas and the like — that gives the garden visual interest through the fall and winter, she said.

People often get seduced by a shrub’s blooms or that quick punch of color from a mass of annuals. They overlook the beauty inherent in leaves, bark, conifer needles, the graceful arms of a bare tree, a simple flagstone path or even a boulder. These are the gardener’s palette for creating more interest in the fall garden, she said.

Here are a few of her suggestions.

Assess the bones of the garden: Too often people think about the plants first when planning a garden. That’s a mistake, she said. The paths, patios, pergolas and other permanent elements to a garden provide structure.

Like a home, a garden needs a good foundation. The plants should come later, just as furniture comes after a home is complete.

Newer homes usually come with what she calls “a starter patio” that’s too small for even a small get-together. She suggested replacing it with a larger one, perhaps made of flagstone.

The type of material used for the patio should be dictated by the style of the garden and the house. If you choose flagstone, make sure the stones are at least 2 inches thick and large enough to set a nice chair on.

An arbor can provide an inviting entry to the garden and draw the eye. Consider a seating area, if the yard is large enough.

When it comes to paths, she often uses gravel or flagstone.

Add more evergreens: Trees and large shrubs also contribute to structure in the garden. Many gardens lack enough plants that keep their leaves all year, other than rhodies and azaleas, Skievaski said.

Successful gardens have a balance of both deciduous and evergreen plants. Gardens also should have plants with a variety of attributes: some that offer interesting foliage, some with bold blossoms and a few with intriguing bark.

Evergreen doesn’t mean just green: Evergreen plants can be yellow or orange or even bluish. Interesting evergreen shrubs and trees are available to augment or replace those ubiquitous rhodies.

Many won’t grow to be towering green monsters. Better check the label to be sure. Dwarf conifers are a solution for small yards.

Select plants with multiseasonal interest. Plants should do their part in the garden through the seasons, particularly in smaller gardens, Skievaski said.

Fall is the best time of the year to plant because roots have a chance to establish in the cool, wet months.

Just for starters, consider the Japanese stewartiatree, which offers the triple combo of amazing bark, flowers and leaves.

If gardeners knew more about the plants available, they’d make other choices, she said.

Great Plant Picks at www.greatplantpicks.org is a good noncommercial resource for researching plants that perform well in the Northwest.

Enhance interest with pots and art: The No. 1 mistake Skievaski sees people make with both pots and garden art is selecting pieces that are too small. Be fearless. Go big.

Selecting garden art is a bit like accessorizing the top of the living room mantel. It’s better to invest in fewer larger pieces than many smaller ones, she said. Just one good piece of garden art can serve as an eye-catching focal point.

Same with containers. They look big in the store, but they often get dwarfed in the landscape. She prefers groups of three. Her rule of thumb is the grouping must have something in common: either the trio is the same color or style or shape. For instance, three red pots in different shapes, or three tall, columnar containers in contrasting colors.

Remove annuals from containers in the fall and spruce up with evergreen and foliage plants. Using one-gallon shrubs is an inexpensive way to add structure. They can be removed and planted in the garden later.

Also think about adding boulders. Never do less than three. Large yards will need groupings of more. The boulders should look natural in the landscape, as if they have emerged out of the ground, she said.

A hunk of stone acts can function as a piece of sculpture in the landscape. And a boulder can double as seating.

If you’ve got a pickup truck and a few muscled friends, boulders are available for about $50 each.

Fall favorites
A few of Heidi Skievaski’s favorite fall-interest plants:

1. Heuchera: a semi-evergreen perennial with bell-shaped flowers. She particularly likes Berry Smoothie, Miracle, Ginger Ale, Peach Flambe.

2. Scarlet leucothoe: a low-growing evergreen shrub that turns burgundy in fall and winter, and has white bell-shaped flowers in spring.

3. Conifers with fall color: She suggested golden pine and Eastern white pine (actually blue in color).

4. Nandina Gulf Stream: an evergreen shrub with red, orange, purple and green fall color and red fruit.

5. Abelia kaleidoscope: a semi-evergreen shrub with variegated gold foliage, white flowers in summer, orange-tinged in fall.

6. Sunshine Blue blueberry: a shrub with bluish foliage that turns red-orange in fall, and offers fruit in August and September.

7. Japanese stewartia: a tree with patchy camouflage-looking bark, red fall color and white summer flowers.

8. Oak leaf hydrangea: a shrub with footlong, cone-shaped, creamy white flowers in summer that fade to pink. Also offers cinnamon-colored peeling bark, and its leaves turn deep red to orange and purple.

9. Coppertina ninebark: a shrub with coppery-colored foliage in spring turning to rich red. Light pink flowers emerge in summer. It also offers red seed capsules and peeling bark.

10. Shasta viburnum: a shrub covered in flat-topped white flowers in late spring. It turns red to purple in the fall, and its berries turn from red to black.

Learn more
Heidi Skievaski, Sublime Garden Design of Snohomish; 206-818-6065; sublimegardendesign.com

At Home: Design rules made for breaking

Leave a reply

I’m not a fan of rules. Give me a rule, and my inner rebel asks why and looks for an exception. While I get that rules have their place in society — kids should stay in school; drivers going the same direction should drive on the same side of the road; everyone should turn off his cell phone in the theater — some rules are needlessly tyrannous.

The customer isn’t always right, for instance. Prepositions are perfectly fine words to end sentences with. And paying dozens of taxes — sales, state, federal, property, gas, sin, and so on — instead of one whopping mega tax is moronically inefficient. Wouldn’t you rather get fleeced once a year than get slowly pecked to death by ducks?

Similarly, while some decorating rules are useful — a few large accessories beat a bunch of small ones for sure — many, and I mean many, are just as unnecessary as hats and gloves on Sunday.

Don’t buy a patterned sofa. Only paint with soft neutrals. Always keep interior trim white. Never put an area rug on carpet. Dining tables and chairs should be matched sets. Blah, blah, blah.

The stream of so-called experts doling decorating do’s and don’ts is as endless as their poor advice, which is often conflicting: Real estate agents say keep your home neutral and impersonal. Designers say give your interiors punch and make your home about you.

No wonder so many DIY home decorators stand stuck and stiff as stalagmites on their threshold. They’re afraid to make a decorating move. If they do conjure the courage, they make design choices so wimpy even their pets yawn.

I didn’t realize how strongly I felt about this until last week, when, buried among the high traffic flow of home improvement pitches that hit my inbox, came one refreshing missive from the folks at Lou Hammond Associates, a leading maker of window-coverings. A welcome departure from the heavy-handed rule list, this pitch featured design rules best ignored.

I read in full, liberated agreement.

Here are some rules the Lou Hammond folks say you can avoid, along with a few more I say to outright break:

• Never mix florals and plaids. Nonsense. Mixed patterns are fun to look at. They create a playground for your eyes. The trick to pulling off a good mix is to vary pattern scale, and mix straight with curved lines. For instance, combine a small floral with a large plaid, or a large floral with a small stripe, said designer Katie Leede, of Santa Monica, Calif. Mix chevrons with botanicals. The secret to success here is to have one pattern contain all the colors in the room.

• Don’t hang drapes around a picture window. You’ll detract from the view. Au contraire. Lovely drapes can enhance a picture window the way a frame sets off a painting, says New York designer James Rixner.

• Don’t paint a small room a bold color. Rubbish. Bold colors define spaces like an embrace. They feel cozy and sexy, says designer Amie Corley, of St. Louis. Strong colors also make artwork seem more dramatic than when art hangs on a wall of wimpy off-white. While homes should have a palette of unifying colors, you can still have flow and use bold colors in defined spaces.

• Keep your ceilings white. This homeowner trap is misguided, uninspired and lazy. In some rooms, a white ceiling makes the fifth wall seem lower. Especially if the room is painted in a rich tone, white ceilings can ruin the look. If you don’t want to paint the ceiling the same shade as the walls, soften the contrast by painting it a lighter shade by mixing a little wall color into white.

• Furniture should go against the wall to maximize floor space. No, no, no, no, no!! Gentle readers, the point of a room is not to maximize floor space, it is to maximize INTERACTION, as in conversation, as in fostering relationships. You can’t do that when the furniture is blasted against the wall as if a giant sea mammal breached the room and emptied its blow hole. Sofas, chairs, console tables, even beds, can float. Pull it together, people.

• Art should always be hung at eye level. So many people are slave to this rule that we may need to reinstate Abraham Lincoln to put an end to this. Repeat after me: Art should be hung in relation to that which it is hanging near. Sure, in a museum, where people are walking by, art should be hung at eye level, which, of course, varies. Otherwise, hang art where it looks good. In a sitting area, it’s nice to have the art at eye level when you’re sitting. Over a table or headboard, hang art so the bottom of the frame is about 8 inches above.

• Baseboards should always be white. Highlighting your baseboards by painting them white is a good idea if you have awesome baseboards. But if your baseboards are underwhelming, say under 4 inches, don’t call them out, paint them to blend. If the room has low ceilings, the racing stripe effect will make the room appear shorter.

But do, please, stay on the right side of the road. And kids, stay in school.

Romney offers new ideas on taxes and immigration

Leave a reply

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican White House candidate Mitt Romney is offering new ideas on the controversial issues of taxes and immigration, sparking a fresh flashpoint with President Barack Obama before their inaugural debate Wednesday.

In interviews, the GOP nominee suggested an option of limiting deductions to pay for his across-the-board income tax cut and revealed that he would honor temporary permission the Obama administration granted to young illegal immigrants to allow them to stay in the country.

The candidates stepped off the campaign trail Tuesday for debate practice and left their running mates to rally voters in swing states. The Romney campaign pounced after Vice President Joe Biden told a North Carolina audience that the middle class has “been buried the last four years.”

Romney posted on Twitter that he agrees with Biden. “The middle class has been buried the last 4 years, which is why we need a change in November.” The campaign also scheduled a conference call with former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu to criticize Biden’s comments.

Biden told about 1,000 people in Charlotte: “This is deadly earnest. How they can justify, how can they justify raising taxes on a middle class that has been buried the last four years? How in Lord’s name can they justify raising their taxes with these tax cuts?”

Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith said Romney’s campaign was making “another desperate and out-of-context attack.”

“As the vice president has been saying all year and again in his remarks today, the middle class was punished by the failed Bush policies that crashed our economy — and a vote for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan is a return to those failed policies,” Smith said.

Biden’s staff responded to the Romney criticism, also via Twitter, saying Biden “made clear in his remarks today that Romney-Ryan would take us back to the failed Bush policies that crashed our economy.”

The dispute followed the Obama campaign’s criticism of Romney’s remarks on immigration in an interview published Tuesday in the Denver Post.

“The people who have received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a two-year visa, should expect that the visa would continue to be valid. I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased,” Romney said. “Before those visas have expired we will have the full immigration reform plan that I’ve proposed.”

Obama announced in June that he would prevent deportation for some children brought to the United States by illegal immigrant parents. Applicants must not have a serious criminal record and must meet other requirements, such as graduating from high school or serving in the U.S. military.

The program closely tracked with the DREAM Act, a bill that failed to pass Congress that would have provided a path to legal status for many young illegal immigrants. Romney said during the Republican presidential primary campaign that he would veto DREAM Act legislation.

Obama campaign spokesman Gabriela Domenzain said Romney’s statement to the Denver Post “raises more questions than it answers,” including whether he would repeal Obama’s policy or deport those who have received a deferment after two years.

“We know he called the DREAM Act a ‘handout’ and that he promised to veto it,” Domenzain said. “Nothing he has said since contradicts this and we should continue to take him at his word.”

The Denver Post interview comes as Romney and Obama are fighting a heated battle for Colorado, whose significant Hispanic population could determine which candidate receives the state’s nine electoral votes.

Throughout the Republican primary, Romney took an aggressive tack on immigration, saying in debates that he approved of “self-deportation,” where undocumented workers would choose to leave the country on their own because they were unable to find work. He assailed rival Rick Perry, the Texas governor, for allowing illegal immigrants to attend Texas state colleges and universities at reduced, in-state tuition rates. Romney always has said he supports a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who serve in the military.

After Romney secured the nomination, he indicated he would review potential legislation from Florida Sen. Marco Rubio that would allow some young illegal immigrants a way to stay in the country.

In another interview Monday with Denver television station KDVR, Romney laid out a possible scenario for paying for proposal to cut all income tax rates by 20 percent. He’s previously said the cuts would be funded by closing loopholes and deductions, but that the specifics would have to be worked out with Congress.

“As an option you could say everybody’s going to get up to a $17,000 deduction; and you could use your charitable deduction, your home mortgage deduction, or others — your health care deduction, and you can fill that bucket, if you will, that $17,000 bucket that way,” Romney said. “And higher income people might have a lower number.”

Obama spent Tuesday preparing for Wednesday’s debate at a resort in Henderson, Nev., while Romney was spending most of the day in practice with plans to tour the debate stage set up on the University of Denver campus.

___

Associated Press writers Philip Elliott in Clinton, Iowa; Mitch Weiss in Charlotte, N.C.; and Kasie Hunt in Denver contributed to this report.

Simple SEO Advice from the Smartest Guy in Canada

Leave a reply

image by glaak
http://www.flickr.com/photos/keso/108805307/

Did that title get your attention? I’m not the smartest guy in Canada but for the past 3 plus years Google has had me ranked #1 for that search phrase. When I did that in July of 2009 it was a neat little gimmick to first, see how fast I could get to page 1 and then top spot and second to show people how easy it can be to rank for long tail search phrases with low competition.

Long Tail Search Phrases

Did that just make you say “what”? Let me explain. If you search on Google for “landscaping”, the search engine algorithm (a long, ever-changing equation that calculates over 200 minute factors on every website page to determine search engine results) searches through its database of billions of web pages and delivers up the top 167 Million of them that relate to the search phrase “landscaping”.

But then if you search for “front yard landscaping” the competition is narrowed down to just over 4.7 Million results. And then when you add the word “ideas” to the end of that, you are down to just 1.25 Million competitors.

Coincidentally our client Cedargate Landscaping comes up in position 5 in the organic search ranking for that phrase but also in position 3 for the short tail search phrase “landscaping”. The point being, that it is easier to rank high for a phrase that includes three or more words in the search query and once you gain a high position for the less competitive phrases you can turn your focus onto the more competitive ones.

So the phrases of three or more words are the long tail search phrases. To gain quick ranking in the search engine results, going after the long tail first is the key. By doing proper keyword research to identify long tail phrases with low competition and relatively high search volume, you can be assured quick positioning at the top of search engines as long as you use the right strategies and best practices. More on that later.

My example of the Smartest Guy in Canada is a great example of a long tail phrase with low competition, but actually very low search volume. It was fairly easy for me to rank well for that term and it has taken a bit of effort to maintain since we did have someone try to compete for the top spotbut they gave up after a year.

Content is King (yawn), Content is Jedi Master Yoda!

The term “content is king” has been thrown around so much that it has become like white noise. I don’t think it has the same impact that it once did. So think of content as Jedi Master Yoda, the most powerful Jedi in the whole galaxy!

However you think of it, well written keyword focused content is critical to your SEO success. Once you have identified the long tail keyword phrase you want to target for that page you need to sit down and start writing or hire an SEO copywriter to help create powerful content.

Good content is not about you. You need to focus on your visitor. What problem do they have that would cause them to search for that phrase. In my landscaping example above, the best long tail phrase in terms of lowest competition and high search volume is “front yard landscaping ideas”. So the content on the page should not be focused on landscape design, or landscape architecture or anything other than front yard landscape ideas.

Writing great content is not as easy as you might expect, or perhaps you are well aware of how challenging it can be. My recommendation would be to hire an experienced SEO copywriter who can put your thoughts and expertise into content worthy of a Jedi Master.

Are people searching for ideas in the early or later stages of their buying process? Probably early, so it’s a good time to give them something of value in exchange for their email address and start nurturing a relationship with them. More on that in a future blog post. Be sure to subscribe to my blog.

Back-Links are The Force

A Jedi is nothing but a guy (or elf) with a fancy sword without The Force. The Force is where a Jedi gets his power. Similarly, high-quality inbound links are where your content will get its power with the search engines. Each link pointing to your content is like a vote, telling Google that your content is important and valuable. Links are like referrals for your business.

Credible inbound links are preferred. Just like a referral, the more credible or believable the referral source the more likely it is you will get the business. So a .gov website linking to you or from amazon.com or facebook.com will carry a lot more weight than a link from bobsyouruncle.com.

Professional link-building services are a great way to create hundreds of high quality inbound links to your web pages. The process of building high quality links is extremely time consuming and requires a certain skill set to do properly.

There are some good tips that I recently came across if you prefer DIY Link Building:

Guest blogging

Other ideas for a successful link building campaign include guest blogging. The general idea behind guest blogs is to get a link to your website posted on an already established website/blog. These links tend to carry more weight in Google because they are harder to acquire. Some sites will have very stringent requirements for the types of articles they will accept, so links from these sites have more value. Another popular and highly successful method is to contact bloggers or webmasters in your niche and simply ask them for a link. Or, ask to be a guest blogger for the sole purpose of getting the chance to link your guest blog posting back to your site. Establishing relationships with reviewers, authors, professors, enthusiasts, topic experts or anyone else who is operating a website in your niche area, whether it be through social networking or message boards, is a great way to build a network of people who might be willing to reference your website in their content.

Join web 2.0 site

Joining a web 2.0 site is an excellent method of developing search engine friendly links. If you are not familiar with the name, web 2.0 is the term used to describe websites that have a social networking component to them. Sites like Squidoo, StumbleUpon, and Delicious generate most of their content from the site users themselves. These types of pages facilitate interactive information sharing as well as collaboration, where you yourself can add articles that include up to 9 free backlinks per article to your website. Don’t duplicate any of your existing articles on your website and use them for either Squidoo or HubPages though, as search engines are filtering out content that way.

The best way to build links and create strong SEO benefits through Squidoo.com is by creating unique content that focuses on your keywords. Always try to incorporate multimedia, such as videos or images to gain more trust and authority quickly. It only takes a few articles until you’ll be able to add on a number of backlinks in your articles to your main site. I also really like Squidoo’s RSS feed widget, as this gives nice backlinks plus context to the links, which is great for search engines.

Link request to your connections

And finally, source your own networks for possible opportunities to build more links. Business contacts, suppliers, distributors, family members, friends, even your children’s school, all have the potential for providing you backlink opportunities. If you have been nice to them and they like you, ask for a free backlink on their website. Of course, the higher page rank or relevant websites you can link to, the better. If you can manage to obtain powerful and valuable links from websites like edu.com, that would be highly beneficial to you SEO efforts.

There are a lot more tactics involved in SEO to help you compete and surpass your competitors in search engine ranking results. The aforementioned tactics are basic initial strategies that help build a strong foundation and starting point for your SEO efforts, and will immediately help you move your website traffic and search engine ranking results to the next level.

Deerfield artist takes craft to the garden — the Chicago Bulls’ garden

Leave a reply

BY NATASHA WASINSKI | Contributor

October 2, 2012 7:26AM

Deerfield resident Sue Reinish, who owns How Does Your Garden Grow? inc., shows off the large perennial garden she created outside the Berto Center, the Chicago Bulls practice facility in Deerfield. | Buzz Orr~Sun-Times Media

Article Extras

Updated: October 2, 2012 8:40AM

DEERFIELD — Sue Reinish is an artist.

Her palette offers roses and petunias, pansies and daffodils.

“Everything I do in terms of landscape, I come at it from the vantage point of color,” she said.

Reinish has operated How Does Your Garden Grow? Inc. in Deerfield for nearly three decades.

A trained ballerina who taught piano and studied painting, Reinish explained that gardening is a similar creative art form.

“When I design landscapes I am really painting a picture,” Reinish said. “I’m painting in the ground and then it grows.”

When she couldn’t dig up any more space around her home, Reinish took to sharing her talent with others.

Her first “public planting,” she said, was for Briarwood Country Club, where she installed five flower beds near the front entrance of the club.

As a member, she couldn’t receive compensation for her work. In return, however, she got the idea and support to start her own landscaping business.

Today, her team of 10 workers does commercial and residential landscaping across the northern suburbs and in Chicago.

Seven employees have been with How Does Your Garden Grow? Inc. for more than a decade. Reinish reciprocates their loyalty by ensuring the typically seasonal business operates year round.

In winter, the crew hangs holiday decorations and plows snow.

Most work, however, is concentrated when the weather is warm and plants are in full bloom.

Projects during the spring and summer months range from lawn mowing and tree trimming to the creation of gardens, ponds, waterfalls and brick patios.

Reinish said the recent creation of a large perennial garden outside the Sheri L. Berto Center in Deerfield was one of the most exciting projects of her career.

Since the Chicago Bulls practice in the facility, Reinish said her workers fought over who got to do the job. On one day, they spotted Bulls superstar Derrick Rose leaving the building.

Needless to say, “it was a feather in my cap,” Reinish said.

How Does Your Garden Grow? Inc. does its fair share of smaller-sized landscaping projects, too.

Reinish recognizes that people are dealing with drastically tighter budgets since the economy took a dip.

That’s why she is happy to take on projects in stages or to keep the work simple, she said.

“My saying is, if you have good taste, I know how to mix plants (and) make something beautiful on small budget or big budget,” Reinish said.

A garden that can create comfortable micro-climate

Leave a reply