2022 State of our Garden Update

It's the end of 2021 and we've moved to a fixer-upper home on about a half-acre of land. We're still in the Northeast not far from the other house, but it was time for a change. If this is your first time visiting, heres a link to our original About page.

We don't have any raised beds, no soil, and no compost pile, so we're basically starting from scratch. There's an open area about 80 x 100 that includes the house, and another 40 x 100 wooded area. We've got our work cut out for us, but it's all good :)

Change is Good

Like everyone else, we're still playing catchup to normalcy in the wake of the 2020 events, and haven't had much time to work on the idigorganics website. Also in 2020 we created a new website called thetoolpit.com in order to separate our DIY segments from the agriculture segments. This made it easier for us to divide the website duties.

In 2022, we hope to streamline the sites and start adding new gardening content to the idigorganics site, and there should also be plenty of DIY content for thetoolpit site given the fixer-upper we just bought.

Google

We've come to really dislike what Google has become the past few years and that includes YouTube.

In November 2020, Google changed its TOS and stated they were placing advertisements on all videos with or without the creator's permission. That decision did not sit well with us. We don't make any money from our videos and neither should Google. Yes, they provide a platform for people to watch our videos, but that platform would be nothing if creators didn't create and upload videos. It would be like throwing a lavish party and having nobody show up.

Google is a publicly traded company and according to Reuters news agency, Google posted $28.8 billion in ad revenue for 2021. They don't need ads on every single video, especially organic gardening videos. We have no control over the ads but most viewers don't know that. We apologize for any ads you're forced to endure.

So . . . we've started removing the product review videos from both the idigorgancs and thetoolpit YouTube channels. The gardening videos will stay for now until we figure out where to put them. We can't justify upgrading our hosting plan in order to host the videos ourselves because the site barely covers the hosting costs as it is.

Amazon

Amazon has a video program that offers an ad-free alternative to YouTube so we've either moved or re-filmed our product reviews and moved them to Amazon.

It's still an affiliate program similar to the one already in place on the website, but it's a video platform, not text-based links. Our Amazon Storefront has a slideshow of the videos we've created thus far - our storefront name is Northway. We still don' t make much money, but at least visitors don't have to sit through any ads to watch the videos, and unlike YouTube, reviewers need to own and use the product they review. The only drawback to Amazon is that it's best suited for short videos, so the lengthier DIY videos will need to find another home.

I'll try to upload some pics and maybe make a video of the new wannabe garden once a little more snow melts.

It's February 14, 2022 as we re-launch the website and we're looking forward to whatever may lie ahead.

Thanks for stopping by.