The National Gardening Association and All Things Plants

First, let me give you a little background. Since 1973, the National Gardening Association has been providing educational resources and funding to create opportunities for children and adults to grow through gardening programs in schools, communities, and backyards across the country. You have probably been exposed to the NGA through your visits to their website: Garden.org.

Since 2000, Dave and Trish Whitinger have been serving the gardening community primarily through the founding and operating of a number of gardening-related websites, starting with Dave's Garden (2000 through 2010) and presently with All Things Plants (2011 to present.) Our desire has always been to encourage and educate gardeners, to bring them together via an online community, and to give them awesome tools to assist in their gardening adventures.

It is with tremendous excitement that we announce the next milestone for us: we have acquired the National Gardening Association, including its name, history, mission, trademarks and websites.

The original mission of the NGA is: to empower every generation to lead healthier lives, build stronger communities, and encourage environmental stewardship through educational garden programs.

In the more recent years, the NGA has fulfilled its mission with three main outlets:

1) Home and community gardening information and support, by operating Garden.org.

2) Youth and school gardening information, support and grants.

3) High quality market research on gardening in America.

These three missions have been split up into new organizations. The Youth/School mission has been taken over by a new 501c3 non-profit organization called KidsGardening.org. The Market Research mission has been taken over by a new organization called GardenResearch.com. The final mission has been retained by us, "The New NGA." As we move into the future, we at the NGA will continue to work closely with these new organizations to support their efforts.

This acquisition was accomplished by our parent company, Dash Works, LLC, which is a Texas corporation owned and operated by Dave and Trish Whitinger. Dave is appointed as Executive Director of the NGA, and Trish has accepted the title of Chief Operating Officer.

The Garden.org website is an excellent source of information for gardeners, and was visited by over 6 million visitors in 2015. It has not been updated in many years, and our immediate task is to update the website with a new and improved software system, and to update the look of the site to give visitors a more up to date experience. Our long term goal is to continue to serve the gardening community with educational resources, reference guides and informational databases, social media features, and helpful tools and apps, all via the Garden.org URL.

The All Things Plants website will continue in operation, and will eventually be merged with the NGA's website, at which time the ATP brand will transition to the NGA's Garden.org brand. The site you have loved for many years will continue as it always has, and will be vastly improved with additional resources, articles, and tools. There won't be any changes in admins, and there are no employees other than those in the Whitinger family. We have a lot of ideas for "The New NGA" and will be exploring those ideas in the weeks, months and years ahead. This is an exciting time for us. This post is the first public announcement of the acquisition, and we wanted our ATP members to be the first to know the news. In the near future we will be releasing a press release to the media.

To hear much more about this, listen to our ATP Podcast episode #100.

This is big news, and we welcome your questions or comments in the threads below.