Something a bit meta today – this post isn’t about my life or my garden. It’s about this website and the blog posts you read here.

Each week, I receive at least a few emails offering to pay me for some kind of space here.

Sometimes it’s a request for a guest post. My general rule is not to accept these. Though a thoughtful proposal from a fellow blogger doing similar things would at least be considered.

But lately they’re mostly coming from third-party SEO (search engine optimisation) companies. These organisations want me to publish a blog that they wrote, and include a link to their client’s website. The idea is the link placed on this website helps improve the search rankings for the client website.

To be clear: to date, I have not been paid to publish content on this website for anyone. No links are paid for. There is no paid-for product placement. I do not run ads.

This website is, for the most part, like any hobby: a money pit.

What is the point?

About a month after we moved here, I wrote my first post on this website. I have been writing on a weekly basis, most weeks, for over 5 years.

The original point of the exercise was to track my progress – the things that go right, the disasters, the poor decisions, the things I learn, the struggles, and successes.

It’s evolved a bit. I started getting messages from friends, family and readers asking “what can I plant now? What should I do?” so I added a monthly planting guide. And sometimes I do a really deep dive into a topic I’ve been learning about. But in amongst all that is just my ordinary life and experiences.

Maybe it’ll be a book one day. Perhaps it’ll be some oddity retained on the Internet Archive for some great-grand nibbling to discover 100 years from now.

I just know that a regular writing habit is good for my brain, and that’s my main motivation.

I subscribe to a somewhat antiquated tradition: the personal blog. For the most part, they became less popular as Twitter in particular and social networks in general took over. Maybe I’m just old, but that’s what this is. It’s my garden blog.

It is a bit old-fashioned to arrive at a website in 2025 that doesn’t smack you over the head with advertising or pop ups begging for your email. But here you are. In a corner of the World Wide Web maintained by someone who has been blogging in some form for quarter of a century now.

I remember (and miss) the Old Internet. In this place, I am able to stubbornly hold onto it.

This website doesn’t exist to drive traffic or sales (though if you’d like to buy your cat a toy, you can). This website exists as a way for me to record my experiences.

I am a writer. I cannot help but to write. When something is on my mind, it ends up on a page. I choose to publish at least some of that writing here.

Don’t even get me started on AI

Look, if AI was useful, then I am convinced it would do the jobs I hate doing.

Most weeks, I spend hours crafting the text of whatever post I’m working on. I come back to it day after day, sometimes for months, before it goes live. This post, for example, has been crafted over 3 months. But I can’t just publish a wall of text.

It needs paragraph breaks, images, headings, links, and formatting. There is useless code the software inserts that I have to remove manually for every single post. And I hate that bit.

I have a dream where I can write a blog, and press a button that says ‘format’. That button would send a little AI off to gather the photos I specified, edit and optimise them, and insert them into the blog along with things like the email subscription box at the bottom of every post. It would automatically remove that stupid code.

Instead, this website has a button on the back-end that will write content for me. I have never pressed that button, but I assume it’ll still leave all the formatting to me.

And that’s the problem – the only piece of this project AI wants to help with is the bit I get an actual benefit from doing myself. Which is just as bad as the companies that want to buy spots to place content.

I massively object to having the piece of this process that I actually enjoy being interfered with. By anyone.

Just bugger off

And yet each week I am bombarded with emails offering to generate posts that don’t fit here. Free money if I just include a link to a gambling website. To use the latest, greatest AI that will inevitably kill any enjoyment I get out of running this thing in the first place.

A recent email I got about writing posts for this website included an example titled “4 Different Ways To Use Small Outdoor Space“. It was an example, not crafted for me, but it made me snort. It was a particularly poor choice.

If you’ve been here for more than 5 minutes you might notice I have a rather large lifestyle block. It’s 30 acres – roughly 7 rugby fields. We keep cows here. When I look out my window, I can literally see for miles. You can see one of our vistas at the top of this page.

Using a small outdoor space in clever ways just simply isn’t something I have much experience with.

The same email offered $30 to pay for an entire, standalone post. That’s about an hour and 15 minutes work at the current New Zealand minimum wage. $30 isn’t worth the time it takes to format the damn thing. It’s not even enough to cover the annual domain name registration.

I’d have to do dozens of these things every month before I could start calling it an income stream, so why would I even bother?

Utter enshittification

Last week I read a blog post written by a local business about growing a crop – it honestly could have been written by any business about any crop.

When all was said and done, it was 500 words that boiled down to ‘plant a seed in your garden and water it’. Technically true, but not very enlightening beyond your second or third year gardening.

I don’t want to publish more of that fluff. The internet is already filled with it. Each time I write a grow guide I have to sift through dozens of them while I research. All of them saying the same damn thing – and, upon reflection I’ve noted that those are never the links I use in my posts.

I don’t take away anything that I didn’t already know. Except for the most beginner of gardeners, you probably don’t either.

They’re filler. Literally there to create traffic that pops up when you search “how to grow ____” and conveniently point you to their products, which of course come highly recommended.

I want to discover the weird stuff with you – for both of us to learn something. To share our observations in the comments and check our thinking against each other.

She’s precious

Every time I reject these offers (some of them are very persistent when ignored), I wonder if my head is so far up my own butt that I’m shooting myself in the foot.

There isn’t anything particular that makes me special. Quite honestly, I don’t think I am. There are hundreds – thousands, even – of white millennial women moving to the country and posting it on the internet.

But this little website is my labour of love, and I feel a sense of obligation to you, my reader, to remain genuine.

You’re choosing to spend your time here, and I take that seriously. It’s not about driving traffic, or even my own stupid pride in my writing ability. It’s about creating (and maintaining) something of value where we learn some weird little tidbit together on a regular basis.

I am open to actually good offers from companies and websites who want to work with me. I’ll give your fertiliser a whirl. I’ll try your spade or mulch product. And I’ll make it crystal clear I was paid or gifted product when and if I do.

But to date, I appear to be too small for these kinds of offers, and big enough for the janky ones. Currently, if I recommend something, it’s because I actually stand by it personally – not because I was paid to.

But I will never allow an AI to write this content – I’d rather take a week off. I won’t publish rubbish ghost posts either.

It’s all just distraction from the real problems in this world, and I won’t allow this space to be a part of it.