Our lovely sponsors this year are donating prizes to the winners. You’ll notice that some categories have more prizes associated with them than others — this is because certain sponsors requested having their prize affiliated with a particular award, which is a pretty neat idea. It was wonderful working with Timber Press, Olive Barn, and Ethel Gloves for the 2010 Mousies. I want to give a special thank you to Shayna at Botanical Intrests Seeds, who really went above and beyond, sometimes tweeting or making a Facebook update about the Mousies before I’d even thought about it!
So, here’s how this is going to work. Botanical Interests, Ethel Gloves, and Olive Barn will be shipping their prizes directly to the winners, but for simplicity’s sake, would like me to collect the addresses and other relevant info from the winners and give them all of the info at one time, then they’ll ship the prizes. Timber Press sent me the books for “Best New Garden Blog” months ago, so I’ll ship those out to Carri as soon as I get her address.
The Prizes:
Botanical Interests Seeds has donated a seed collection for each winner, and a larger prize package for the Blog of the Year winner.
What an awards season: with 548 nomination ballots (our most ever), and a whopping 5,042 individual votes cast, it’s clear that there is plenty of interest in garden blogs! I heard over and over again that there were some really tough choices to be made on that final ballot, and I can’t agree more — every one of the finalists was a stellar example of what you can do with a passion for gardening, good writing, and the talent to pull it all together.
Congratulations to all of you!! I’ll have winner badges and prize information available for you in the near future. Let’s do it again next year, shall we?
The nominations have been tallied, and the final ballot is ready! Huge, huge congratulations to all of the finalists! Voting is open now through May 17th.
Finalists: If you’d like to have a poll widget for your category, shoot me an email at colleen at inthegardenonline.com and I’ll send you the embed code.
Garden communicator extraordinaire Shirley Bovshow recently covered the Mousies in a segment for her excellent Garden World Report show. Below, you can watch the segment about the Mousies, but be sure to head over to her website to watch the entire episode. It is always entertaining and informative. I’m very happy to have Shirley’s Garden World Report as our official media sponsor for the 2010 Mouse & Trowel Awards. Thanks, Shirley!
Nominations for the 2010 Mousies starts today (!) and we’re rolling out a new badge to help spread the word. If you’d like to display the badge, please feel free to copy the code below and paste it into your blog. Thanks for helping to spread the word!
We changed up the categories this year, adding a few new, more relevant awards and getting rid of some that just didn’t make sense anymore. We’re trying to showcase as wide a variety of blogs as possible, so I hope you find something here that excites you.
Nominations start on April 1 and end on April 30th, plenty of time to nominate your favorites. I’m announcing the categories now so that you can start thinking about who you want to nominate!
Without further ado, here are the 2010 Mouse & Trowel Awards categories:
General Categories:
Best Writing
Best Photography
Best Blog Design
Post of the Year
Garden Blog of the Year
Best New Garden Blog (blog in which the first post was published on or after 1/1/09)
Best Gardenblogger to Follow on Twitter
Niche Categories:
Best Urban Gardening Blog
Best Rural Gardening/Farming Blog
Best Indoor Gardening Blog
Best Garden Design Blog
Best Container Gardening Blog
Best Blog About Growing Food
Best Blog by a Company (This is where we recognize a company that’s doing a good job blogging. It could be a newspaper, magazine, garden product, or nursery.)
Something for everyone I think, and I’m hoping to discover lots of new blogs through your nominations! So, start thinking — nominations start in less than one month!
The original garden blog awards are back to do what we do best: honor the very best in garden blogs. This year’s awards are bigger and better than ever, with more categories, easier ways to spread the word, and a simplified voting process.
One big change we’re making this year is that we are now accepting sponsorships for the Mousies. If you know of a garden-related organization that would be interested in sponsoring the awards (and earning plenty of love from the gardenblogging community!) please contact me at colleen {at} inthegardenonline.com .
I’ll be updating this page regularly with news about categories, a nomination timeline, and (hopefully!) news about our sponsors. You can also keep up with us on Twitter and Facebook.
Thank you, as always, for your support!
Colleen Vanderlinden
Founder, Mouse & Trowel Awards
IntheGardenOnline.com
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