Celebrating 4 Years of All Things Plants

As we enter our fifth year of All Things Plants, let me first say how grateful Trish and I are to all of you who have joined us. We can't imagine a world in which we're not running a gardening site, and without you, our members, this would be an empty endeavor. To those who knew us before we started ATP, we can't express our gratitude enough for your loyalty and friendship.

Thank you to the administrators @zuzu, @Calif_Sue, @eclayne and @KentPfeiffer, as well as the numerous moderators, you are the ones who run this site alongside us. You're the ones who keep the forums running smoothly and the database accurate and up to date. The effort you all spend is what makes this site useful, informative and fun for all the many thousands of visitors that come to the site each day.

While this is a serious website, the whole point of All Things Plants is to have fun. We all share our love of gardening and all things related to plants, and ATP exists as a place to gather around that common interest and have fun while doing it. Between posting images from our gardens, giving (and getting!) thumbs-ups, tipping each other with acorns, entering contests, commenting on ideas or answering questions in the forums, I hope you're all having as much fun as we are.

And we're growing. In the past year (July 4th, 2014 to present) we ended up having around 1.15 million different people come to the site! That is an increase of about 33% from the year prior, when we had 860,000 visitors. We had 14,833 new members register to join us, compared to 5,933 the previous year. In the forums, we had 242,000 posts compared to 207K during the previous year. Those are a lot of big numbers!

Now, let's have some more fun. 7 different (anonymous) members have stepped forward and kicked in from their acorn stash so that we could have a contest. To enter, all you have to do is post a comment below. You can start a new thread or you can join an existing thread. One post is all it takes to be entered (multiple posts do not increase your chance of winning. )

The contest goes all weekend. Monday morning I will pull the names of all the people who posted, and then we'll do a drawing. Each person gets one ticket and the drawing will be done by video and posted on the site sometime on Monday. There will be 12 winners. The first 8 get 250 acorns. #9 gets 200 acorns. #10 and #11 each get 100 acorns and finally the 12th place winner gets 75 acorns.

So, are you having fun at ATP? Has it enhanced your enjoyment of gardening? Tell us how in the comments below.