Garden Making Magazine Arrives

I received a new garden magazine in the mail today: Garden Making Magazine. It was a complementary copy sent to encourage me to subscribe.

I have had a subscription to Canadian Gardening Magazine for more than three years now and often picked up a newsstand copy before that. I have to admit to becoming a little disappointed over the last year or so with the content in Canadian Gardening. Much of the content is too basic, sometimes inaccurate in it’s simplicity, and it is very commercial. While I understand that the objective of a magazine is to sell ad content, Canadian Gardening now seems to be excessively weighted toward ads or even worse if my view, blatant product placement disguised as articles (witness CG market – 5 pages of product recommendations from rakes to lipstick).

Garden Making Magazine is a new, quarterly Canadian gardening magazine edited by Beckie Fox, former staffer and editor of Canadian Gardening. I have had the opportunity to read two recent editions of this new magazine: the Fall 2010 edition (my neighbours’ free copy) and the Winter 2010/11 edition (my trial copy). I was impressed with what I saw. There seemed, at least so far, to be more depth than splash. Articles were interesting and seemed to provide more information that those in Canadian Gardening. I particularly enjoyed the articles Grow Great Garlic in the Fall 2010 edition and A Pruner Primer in the Winter 2010/11 edition. Both articles were informative and provided a depth that I don’t often find in Canadian Gardening. Comparing the article on beets in the Fall Winter 2010/2011 edition of Canadian Gardening to the article on garlic mentioned earlier the Garden Making article on garlic seemed to be more than twice as long.

To sum it up, Canadian Gardening is lot’s of eye candy (big pictures) and ads, with little actual content while so far Garden Making seems to provide more garden content supplemented with nice pictures and yes, some ads. It reminded me a little more of one of my favourite garden magazines Fine Gardening. So, liking what I saw, I signed up for a two year subscription. I’m sure the low ad content won’t hold over time but I hope at least the content will.