Flower Garden in Florida

Posted on March 29, 2013 by fmadmin

It’s the perfect time of the year to visit our greenhouse! This is the month when we get the prettiest flowers for your garden.  Walking into the greenhouse and seeing all of the beautiful hues of pink, lavender, red, orange, yellow and blue put a smile on my face everyday.  In order to have a successful flower garden, you must know your garden’s sun pattern.  Does the flower garden area get the morning sun or the afternoon shade?  Let’s start with the sun-loving plants for your flower garden.

Sun Loving Flower Garden

If you love yellow flowers, then you can’t go wrong with these Bush Daisies in your flower garden.  Make sure to give them enough space when planting because they’ll definitively spread into a beautiful bush.  Very easy to take care off, they just need to be regularly watered when first planting.  Once they are established, they’ll be fine with weekly waterings.  They do love sun, so make sure they get plenty of it.

Flower Garden

Bush Daisies

Another showy flower is the “Cleome” or Spider Flower.  Cleome is available in white, pink and beautiful fuscia bringing amazing color to your flower garden.  This flowering plant is an annual and it will bloom from now until fall.  They are native to South America, which makes them great drought tolerant plants for Florida weather.

Flower Garden

Cleome or Spider Flower

Once you decide where to put your flower garden, make sure to figure out how much sun that area gets daily.  The amount of sun your garden gets will define what type of flowers will survive.  Make sure to water your newly planted flowers daily until they are fully established.  Depending on flower type and the soil conditions of your garden, after two to three weeks, you may need to change your watering schedule.  Here are some resources for gardening in Florida:

Bed Preparation is the key to successful flowers and vegetables

Florida Yards and Neighborhoods Handbook

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Looking for a Social Media Conference?

Posted on March 19, 2013 by fmadmin

2012 was the year I became a “marketer” for the Market.  I had already created Facebook and Twitter accounts for the market, but neither of my college degrees prepared me for Social Media.  As a result, I attended three social media conferences in 2012, one of which inspired me to start this blog.  Two conferences had the feel of a social training event.  The vibe and atmosphere of the events encouraged networking and sharing of ideas between participants.  The other conference was geared more towards retailers and the social media training was nonexistent.  Ironic to me  because “social” was part of their tittle.

And now for the FTC disclosure: you should know, I have been invited to attend Social Fresh in exchange for my honest opinion.

Having had such good and not so good experiences at these social media conferences I had to find out more about Social Fresh 2013.  Social Fresh is a social media conference coming to Tampa on April 18-19, 2013.  This social media event will take place at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel located at 4500 W Cypress Street, Tampa.  Hotel rates for the event are $139/night with special promotion code SOC.

What makes Social Fresh 2013 the Social Media Conference to attend?

With over 49k followers on Twitter and 23k fans on Facebook, my interest was peaked.  What do these people know about social media training?  First, let’s look at the history of Social Fresh.  Social Fresh was founded by Jason Keath in 2009 as a social media training company.  Their website offers free and paid materials all related to social media training.   The Social Media Blog was just listed as the #1 Social Media Blog by the Social Media Examiner.  Their flagship event is the Social Fresh one day social media conference.  Social Media Today listed Social Fresh 2013 as one of the best 12 social media conference to attend in 2013.  As a hopeful “soon to be” small business owner, I was glad to see that 14% of their past attendees were business owners/partners and 11% were small business owners.  So far so good.

Secondly, we all like choices.  Choices are nice when you are trying to decide what to eat a restaurant.  However, when you are attending a conference, making choices between speakers is a completely different thing.  I always get that feeling in my gut that no matter what I’ve chosen, I’ve picked the wrong one.  Luckily for people like me, Social Fresh is a one-track social media conference.  No more worrying whether you picked the wrong speaker or not.  Win win.

Lastly, the caliber of speakers and the presentation topics surely have great promise.  I’m looking forward to hopefully meeting Ted Rubin from Collective Bias (previously with e.l.f. cosmetics and OpenSky).  Ted Rubin is the most followed Chief Marketing Officer on Twitter.  Clearly, he is doing something right.  Other great speakers I’m looking forward to are Adam Kmiec (Campbells), Morgan Johnston (JetBlue) and Kevin Vine (DunkinDonuts).

In addition to having world known speakers, what makes a great conference is the networking opportunities.  Social Fresh has scheduled networking receptions both nights of the conference.

For more information check out Social Media:

Website: www.socialfreshconference.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/socialfresh 

Twitter: www.twitter.com/socialfresh

 

 

 

 

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Processed Free March, are you in?

Posted on March 16, 2013 by fmadmin

Through Instagram, I found Laury Raiken who writes The Fitness Dish blog.  During the month of March she is doing a challenge called “Processed Free March”.  There are no giveaways for this challenge.  Her goal is simply to raise consumer awareness about what real food looks like.  If you know me, then you know I was definitively interested in participating.

 

The “Processed Free March” challenge got me thinking.  Are we “processed free” at home?  The quick answer would be no.  We are not completely “processed free”.  With two little girls at home, there’s bound to be some Fruity Pebbles and Oreos in our pantry.  My husband’s love for Diet Coke and our love for pork easily takes our household out of that classification.  We still drink mostly cow’s milk; although I make my smoothies with almond/coconut milk.  I love white rice, so I limit our intake by cooking quinoa or millet.

 

Processed Free March

Poached Eggs, sweet potato and berries.

So for this challenge, my goal is to add more veggies and fruits to our meals.  My definition of processed foods really means “fast food”.  The food you get from a drive through.  Now, please understand I do occasionally eat a cheeseburger from McDonald’s   And yes, my daughters love the chicken nuggets happy meals too.  But to us, going to McD’s is a treat, it is a “fun food day”.   Prepared foods that come out of a box with instructions or out of the freezer section would also qualify as processed foods.  I’m not talking about frozen or canned veggies.  Eating frozen or canned veggies is better than not eating any vegetables at all.

 

 

The point of this “Processed Free March” challenge is not to focus on the things you can’t make at home because you have too much on your plate already.  To me the point of the challenge is to see where you can start cutting unhealthy foods out of your diet and adding healthy foods instead.  Try a new vegetable, visit a new grocery store, check out a new cookbook.  There are so many ways to include real foods in your diet.

 

Here are some good sources to get you started:

Fruit and Veggies More Matters

Healthy Living Blogs

Simple Green Smoothies

 

Are you in?  With fifteen days left in March, will you join us in the “Processed Free” March Challenge?  Upload your pictures on our Facebook page with the #ProcessedFreeMarch or add the hash tag to your pictures on Instagram!

 

Are you “Processed Free”?

 

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