Turned Earth: Small Business Blog of the Day

Today's blog appears courtesy Mike Sansone's blog ConverStations. Mike has a good list of business blogs available from the home page.

What it is
O'Connell Landscape's Turned Earth is written by Michael O'Connell, a Landscape Designer & Project Manager at the company his parents co-founded in Novato, California.

Features
Well-rounded blog about the company including images of projects as they progress, articles about landscape design, and relevant local-based posts like the fact they are getting a ton of rain this year in California, and it may affect their project schedules.

Favorite Post
This post shows the finished project for a house in San Rafael, California, with links to previous pictures so we can see the entire progress of the project. I love this because it really shows exactly how the company works, what their product is, and the process behind doing the job.

Further Comments
Pretty good business blog. There are a few posts that are borderline to me. Michael writes a couple posts about bicycling to work and one about pricing at a garden center versus Home Depot.

The bicycling posts are off topic from Landscape Architecture, but it does give us a personal insight to the author which is key to a good blog.

The pricing post sort of explains why prices might be higher at a garden center or through a landscaping company than at Home Depot, but it comes across as a little "I hate box stores" where I'd like to see a better explanation of why it costs more rather than a "drinks at a bar" analogy.

On the other hand, most of the posts are excellent and I found myself totally drawn into reading about the different sizes of trees you can buy and what you can expect when you buy them. Since I'm not really in the market for buying trees, the fact that I was still drawn to this post says something about the author.

Tags: landscape architecture | michael oconnell | california | turned earth | novato