I was looking through the Upcoming Events list and was just wondering how you come up with ideas for the Plant Week Topics? I know I saw Xeriscapic plants on a different web site during the same time it ran on ATP. Was just curious how that worked. Do any them repeat each year? I mean like (may be not the exact same ideas/articles) Spring Bulbs week, or Annuals or that type?

Some of the themes are repeated. Daylilies and roses, for example, are popular enough to have a week devoted to them each year. The articles on daylilies and roses, however, have been new each year.

If I remember correctly they solicited ideas from us, then made the decisions from there. I believe this is only the second year for this features and it was changed a little but there are some repeats.

That was kind of what I thought maybe took place as far as the popular topics. Just still being pretty new to the site was not sure if some were repeated (or will be) on a yearly basis or not.

Last year was the first year. The forum moderators helped and we had topics and dates arranged for the entire year (2013) by Oct of 2012. While the membership knew we were featuring one plant per month, they didn't know which plants were scheduled for each month. It was a surprise to everyone except the moderators. We were also hoping to not be copied on different sites

This year (2014), we asked our members for recommendations and we scheduled out the whole year by Nov of 2013.
We also published the schedule for everyone to see what was coming up.
http://garden.org/barn/events/

The weeks that were repeated from previous years (roses, daylilies)- the topic was a repeat, but the information was new. In other words, different information/articles/ideas were given.

The Plant Weeks have been a lot of fun!

Trish! It is always very informative also! I was just curious as to how it worked and if any of them would be repeated in the coming year.

Trish, an idea -- during each plant week, could you somehow link previously published articles that are relevant to the topic? (Or does this already happen, I can't remember.) This would be particularly useful for popular repeating topics.

The system does try to pull relevant articles automatically. I'm afraid that's going to be as good as it gets due to time constraints.

They're easy enough to find, Deb. If you go to the main Ideas and Articles page and use the search box there, you can find all of the Daylily articles, for instance, by entering daylily in the search box.

I have not played with search much, will try it out.

I loved the plant weeks.