Cold Climate Gardening

Got this email today:

About 6 months ago, Mapmuse.com began a project- the interactive mapping of garden centers and nurseries across the US. We initially researched and populated these maps ourselves, with the idea in mind that the public would subsequently add to, and enhance, the information we provided. We mapped each garden center or nursery, and provided space for a written description, photo, and link to a website. Since this project was launched, gardening enthusiasts have made hundreds of additions and enhancements to our maps. If you were one of these contributers, we’d like to thank you for your help!

If you know of any garden centers or nurseries in your local community that are new or have closed in the last six months, I am writing to ask that you make those changes to the maps. Also, please feel free to add any places that are still missing. The link to the Garden Centers and Nurseries Map is as follows:
http://find.mapmuse.com/re1/interest.php?brandID=GARDEN_CENTERS

If you are not familiar with Mapmuse, we are a highly trafficked website with an Alexa traffic rating of 17,000 in the world. Our goal is to help people find places related to their interests.

I had never heard of MapMuse, so I decided to check it out. It starts at the national level but you can zoom down to street level. I entered my city, state and zip code and it brought up a map centered on my town. It left out the big box stores but did show most of the independent nurseries that I knew about in my area. I told it to show me everything within 100 miles and it brought a lot more nurseries to my attention. I am somewhat familiar with the Ithaca area and saw some nurseries missing from there. I also saw nurseries in other areas that I hadn’t heard of. My sense was that it had enough information to be useful, but could be made even more useful if gardeners like you and me did submit more garden centers and nurseries as requested. This site would be especially handy if you are going to be visiting a new area, either on vacation or because of relocation. Technology put to good use.

One thing I didn’t care for was that the site was just crawling with ads, but this can be easily remedied if you browse with Firefox or Opera. Firefox users must install an extension called AdBlock, which is not hard to do. Opera has content blocking built in. Both browsers can use wildcards, so that, for example, you can block all doubleclick ads by using *doubleclick* in the field for content to block. (The asterisk basically represents every and any character.) By using the wildcards, you block every doubleclick ad, not just one specific ad on one specific site. Surfing is much more pleasant without those things flashing in your face. Once again, technology put to good use.

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