Where In The World Are We?

Jodi at bloomingwriter has thrown out a challenge to other garden bloggers. She actually made this challenge quite a while ago but better later than never!

Tell your readers a bit about your hometown, your state, province…something that really tells us where you are in the world. What’s really special about your community? Pretend you’re trying to entice visitors to the region, and remember—what might be obvious to you isn’t necessarily obvious to even the blogger in the community next door.

A tough time of year for me for this challenge. Right now I'm dreaming of becoming a snow bird and living someplace - any place - tropical during the winter months. But only for the winter months as Upstate New York is beautiful in the other three seasons.

You won't find Snowville or Lake Effect on any map. So lets start with exactly where is Upstate New York? This map shows most of what I consider to be Upstate. It is frustrating when I travel and people hear New York and all they can picture is NYC. I tell them we live where they keep the cows. We live much closer to Ottawa, Montreal, and even Toronto than we do to NYC.

The point on the map is Pulaski, NY. Pulaski is where our garden club meets and is more or less half way between us. Living at the east end of Lake Ontario makes winters a bit of a challenge. To understand a little bit about our winters here go read what I recently wrote about Winter on the Tug Hill. We are between Lake Ontario and the Tug Hill so our winters are much the same. Last year I had over 225" of snow. This winter has been much easier but we still have March to get through. But I'm supposed to be telling you why this is a great place to be, so enough about winter.

Spring, summer and fall are mild and beautiful here. We have all of the recreational opportunities afforded by Lake Ontario; State Parks, Lighthouses, Beaches, fishing and hiking.

The Thousand Islands are just to our north and we spent a day there last summer touring Singer and Boldt Castles.

The very large green spot on the map is the Adirondack Park, a short drive to our east.

We have many lakes and rivers nearby too numerous to mention here. Upstate is also rich with historical places to visit.

From a gardening standpoint we are fortunate to be members of a large gardening club where we can swap plants and stories. Small nurseries and friend's gardens are always available for tours. We can easily drive to Syracuse or Rochester for shows or symposiums and we'd like to make the Buffalo Garden Walk and annual trip!