Time for cake! SDG hits another milestone

Happy birthday to us! It’s time for cake!

On Saturday (June 1), Sacramento Digs Gardening celebrates its sixth anniversary. Since June 1, 2018, we’ve posted (at least) one original story every day to our website. And with technology willing, almost all of those stories went out the same day as our e-newsletter.

That’s 2,191 blog posts – all devoted to local gardening and homegrown food.

We started Sunday recipes early on in this journey (July 2018) and now have more than 300 recipes posted online. To make them easier to access for our readers, we broke them down into four seasonal e-cookbooks that are also available online. That series started with “Taste Spring!” and continued with compilations for Summer, Fall and Winter.

Did I mention readers can access all this for free? No paywall, no fees; just good solid local information at your fingertips. We truly are news you can use.

Because all gardening is local, and gardeners need vetted local expertise for the best chances at success.

Your SDG team – Debbie Arrington and Kathy Morrison – are that kind of experts. We obviously care deeply about Sacramento-area gardening because that’s where we garden, too.

Over the years, we’ve developed SDG into the kind of gardening blog we’d like to read: Packed with events and information about what we need to know now. (And then, what to do with all that fruit and vegetables we grew.)

What keeps us writing and posting? Our readers. We now have about 2,500 followers on Facebook who are looking for us every day. Our average Facebook readers tend to be a lot like us: Women over age 60. (In fact, 83% of our Facebook followers are female and, like Facebook in general, tend to skew toward boomers.)

But Facebook is just one way people find SDG. Thanks to our sponsor Green Acres Nursery & Supply, nursery customers can find direct links to our website and recipes via new signs with QR codes.

We also see a lot of readers from our web host, CaliforniaLocal.com, and from search engines. According to its data, “Sacramento Digs Gardening” showed up in 23,823 Google searches since December 2022 when we migrated to the CaliforniaLocal.com platform. Our website has had more than 141,000 page views since that move, too. That’s almost 8,000 page views a month. Thank you, California Local!

To keep going and growing, SDG needs sponsors. We’re thankful for Green Acres’ support as well as that of our original sponsor, the Regional Water Authority/BeWaterSmart.info, and its “Summer Strong” campaign.