I started A Wildflower Journal in 2019 . I had been providing observations and posts to Kamloops Trails, but it got to the point where there was nowhere to fit those posts in. I had some choices:

stop sharing posts
move them to a subsite (free to me, but the domain is harder to find)
start a new website

I chose to open a new website, but also chose to make this a limited scope – a journal of what I found and some posts on specific species, expanded from research. In hiking season, there was ample material and in the off season, posts/pages could be devoted to species.

Some time later, I also started to take a lot of photos and to be more methodical about gardening and I decided to start a limited gardening site – A Gardeners Journal. I contributed content there, but over time I found it to be too much since much of my time was already spent hiking and providing posts to KamloopsTrails.com, paddling and writing posts to KamloopsKayak.com, researching and writing posts to Wildflowerjournal.net, and writing content to a new site – Ramble.on.ca. this is an eclectic site with articles written that are really surplus to the other sites, but also book reviews, observations, and so on. It is still under development and has a limited audience.

Of the sites currently in use, A Gardeners Journal has been put on hold and any garden-related content will go onto A Wildflower Journal. Another content location is YouTube with over 500 videos now published.

At this time I am reviewing what I can sustain and A Wildflower Journal is under consideration. Here are some stats:

In 2022, the site had 10 409 visits from 7000+ visitors
The majority of visitors check from March through July, in wildflower season.
2023 is on schedule to meet the same numbers.
Comments are infrequent. The website has only 16 subscribers.

So, what to do?

The current plan is to expand the site more, to add community events related to plants, naturalist events, grasslands events, related news, and so on. There are many functional ways to do this and it will be staged in over time. I will try that for a year to see if there is more interest in the site. The website is one of several and the cost to me is the domain (about $14/year), plus a share of the webhosting costs. I could offset these costs with advertising revenue, but this is a hobby that I contribute too so for a year, I will bear the costs.

Watch for: