It's over (for now!)

Forgive me blog readers, for I have sinned. It has been18 days since my last post.

I am still recovering from Garden Walk Buffalo and the National Garden Festival (and doing all the work from my day job that went undone). Garden Walk Buffalo was another big success.

It looked like this solid for two days
(between 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. both days)

This year the local press for Garden Walk Buffalo was outstanding. Not sure why. We did nothing on our end different this year. It's as though they finally "got" us. But it did help that we had zip code research, from last year, to quantify the out-of-town visitors, and survey results that documents our "little garden tour" has a direct economic impact of $3.6 million on the local economy. If you add the commonly accepted "tourism multipliers" to the $3.6 million, the economic impact is closer to $10 million, but that's harder to quantify.

There was LOTS of coverage from all three local TV stations as well as from the Buffalo News. The News had articles about the Walk from the Thursday before through the Monday after. I'll post some of the articles in the coming days.

A research company (one of those "mall intercept" firms) was hired by Visit Buffalo Niagara to survey visitors. Zip code collection was also done to gauge where people are coming from. This year, we helped fill local hotels to at or near capacity, so we were especially curious to see the zip code results, which is not yet in. I'll cover some of those results in upcoming posts.

In our own yard, I estimate we had over 2,000 visitors over two days (my neighbor Steve counted 1,814). In past years, there were often lulls in visitors, this year there were no lulls. Constant people i the garden. They traverse mostly my driveway, so no harm done. I can't imagine what damage gets done to other gardener's grass paths!