Welcome To My Garden had its two-month birthday on the 24th of August and a lot has happened since it got thrown into the universe! So it’s time for an update.

If you’re following us on Facebook, you will probably have noticed that we have reached the milestone of 10.000 users and 3.000 active daily users. Over 1.800 hosts registered their gardens in Belgium alone (just checked the map again because this is such a crazy number!) and we’re excited to see that spots are also emerging in neighbouring countries, most notably France. We’re still trying to stay under the radar internationally though because a high increase in user numbers would also mean a high increase in costs. 

Now that we’re talking about money: thank you so much for your donations! Thanks to your generosity we can keep WTMG alive and we can now confidently say that WTMG is here to stay. As promised, we’re going to give you a little more insight into how your money is being used. All donations are going towards the technical infrastructure costs which currently are around €175 a month. Let’s break this down for you: 

July

Fastmail € 5,11

Sendgrid € 76,00

Firebase € 76,99

DigitalOcean € 16,90

August

Sendgrid € 76,00

Firebase € 77,55

Fastmail € 5,11

DigitalOcean € 16,90

We’re also delighted to tell you that we’ve received a summer subsidy from VGC (Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie). We’re using this to 1) cover our technical infrastructure costs in July and August and 2) it allows us to give a small remuneration to three very talented students and our core team of volunteers who have worked incredibly hard this summer. To be very clear: only the subsidy budget will be used to pay the student and volunteer remunerations; your donations are solely used to cover our technical costs. In case you’re wondering: the VGC actually stipulates that we spend a certain amount of the funding on volunteer remuneration.

So what did we get done? There’ve been a lot of minor changes - repairing bugs reported by you, our users - and we’ve now implemented Dutch and French translations for almost the entire website! If you are an Android, iOs or Windows device user you can now also use WTMG as an app - simply go to www.welcometomygarden.org on your phone and click ‘Add to home screen’. Yay! We will continue to improve your user experience and implement new functionality based on your invaluable user feedback. 

The summer may be drawing to an end, but like we said, WTMG is here to stay. So keep going on adventures and hosting guests whenever you like! We’re very excited about what WTMG has brought so far and love hearing all those stories about wonderful encounters. Speaking for the team, WTMG has added a lot meaning to our lives, and listening to your testimonials, it has done the same for everyone using the platform too! So thank you for joining the ride and for your willingness to try something new, and accept strangers into your lives. Without your adventurous spirits and generosity we wouldn’t have gotten here. We’ve definitely proven that if ordinary people join forces they can achieve a lot of great things and can make a lot of people smile. So keep connecting, keep gardening and keep exploring!

As always, gardenly yours, 

The WTMG team