Final Year for This Website

February 18th, 2025

   I’ve been gradually shedding layers of my career as I’ve inched toward retirement these last few years, and now I’m down to writing for The Patriot-News/PennLive.com, doing a couple of free-lance writing gigs, and running this website.

Old George in a familiar position.

   I’ve decided it’s time to scratch No. 3 off that list.

   As of the end of 2025, I’m retiring from the website business and saying goodbye to GeorgeWeigel.net.

   I’ll continue to write biweekly posts here for the rest of this year as well as add about three new entries each month to the Plant Profiles section and send out monthly roundups of what all I’ve been writing about.

   After that, this site will go into suspended animation until my contract for use of the GeorgeWeigel.net domain runs out – at the end of April 2026.

   Going down with the site will be the “Buy Helpful Info” section, which means you won’t be able to buy my “Pennsylvania Month-by-Month Gardening” book, my “50 Public Gardens You Really Ought to See” e-book, and my 19-page “Pennsylvania Survivor Plants” booklet. So if you’re interested in any of those, head over to that section and order what you’d like sometime before the end of the year.

   I’ve been writing posts and adding “content” (what used to be called articles) to this site for more than 20 years. That means there’s a lot of information attached to it – photos, lists, plant profiles, garden columns, monthly tips, musings, opinions, and assorted stuff that I thought might be of interest to home gardeners.

   Most of it is still useful today. Rather than see it all go down the drain, I thought I’d put it up for sale – all or in part – maybe to some future or budding garden writer as an alternative to starting from scratch.

   Or possibly some of you would like to buy photos and use them for your own projects, whether it’s a personal crafty thing or use in Power Points, your own website or Facebook pages, or as illustrations for newsletters, articles, and such.    I have thousands of images on just about any gardening topic, and I’m willing to turn them over with carte blanche rights for $10 each.

   Same with most of the articles, lists, and profiles I’ve done here. If you see something you like and would be interested in using them or even recycling/rewriting them as your own, that’s also OK with me. I’d be happy to work out a fair price depending on the size and number of articles.

   Feel free to scroll through the site to see what’s there, or type in a topic in the search box at the top right to see if I’ve done anything on a subject in which you’re interested.

   And if you or someone you know is interested in taking over the whole website lock, stock, and barrel, give me a yell. It’s possible to migrate everything over to a new, different, or existing domain.

   I should warn you, though, that this is a website that was never designed to make money. I know that’s not very capitalist, but my main purpose was to share info with fellow gardeners as well as to serve as a home base for my one-time Garden House-Calls consulting business and the many garden trips I used to do.

   I never charged any kind of use or subscriber fees, and I didn’t like the idea of cluttering up the site with ads – especially ones from non-gardening entities or possibly ones involving plants, products, or sellers I didn’t heartily believe in.

   And so I’ve pretty much eaten the operational costs and offset some of the management time through occasional donations from generous gardeners and some marginal income from the sale of my books and booklets.

   That’s not to say a site like this can’t be a money-maker, if anyone is interested in that angle. Since gobs of “content” already exist, a time-consuming foundation is already in place.

   Someone who’s good at generating “hits,” milking search engines (“SEO”), giving a fresh look, trading mentions/links for dollars, and generating new “content” geared to audience-draw no doubt could do a lot with the old-school concept that I developed here.

   I totally ignored all of the techie things you’re supposed to do to develop a successful online presence – right down to not even getting involved with Facebook. My low-tech game plan was to try to write interesting stuff, support that with photos, and put it out there for people to find – if they were interested.

   So that’s the story. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my “content” and maybe learned a few pointers that helped you in the garden. Thanks especially to the reader/friends who contributed along the way. You’ll find a list of them on the George’s Friends page.

   I’ll keep things coming for another 10 months and then divert the time into chasing away the neighborhood deer and keeping my pots watered. Also maybe a few naps.