I’ve been asked to suggest some useful web-sites for OM readers as I am an expert, or so I’m told, on the subject. But it wasn’t always so.

This time last year, down here by Bantry Bay, I was weeding my many ridges of garlic and onions and giving them the odd feed of seaweed "soup" and a dressing of "The Sand". Thoughts of marketing tons of Irish Natural Garlic in the coming autumn and winter were an attractive, if slightly intimidating, prospect. I was wondering too whether I should take up a friend’s suggestion and create a website to help in the selling of the produce. Despite my generation’s techno-terror I thought it might be a bit of a challenge to try it– an interesting high-tech string to my more basic natural-gardening bow. And it also sounded so irrestibly "with it".

But first, the garlic had to be nurtured, harvested and dried.

A year on, having been visited by a fungus which destroyed most of the crop in storage, my lifestyle has somewhat changed. Bugs are still a nuisance - but I’m now dealing with a kind that doesn’t respond to a garlic and fish-oil spray – those of the computer kind.

I am now a webmaster.

I have a website and I do manage it myself – so therefore I am a webmaster (has a nice ring to it doesn’t it?). That’s what they, at my host server, tell me anyway.

From Garlic Man to a Dot Commer in one wet winter has been a bit of an odyssey, a brain twister.

But I find myself still involved in weeding.

There is so much rubbish on the Web, even in the organic area, that, having wasted so much of my own time, I thought I would publish a guide for others and help them save theirs. At first I planned to do a simple, single, Home Page, some wet winter’s day, with perhaps ten recommended sites and a bit of advice on how not to grow garlic. But, like the proverbial beanstalk, it grew and grew and grew – and now its become, www.planorganic.com – whatever that is! Poor David Storey tries to make sense of it all above.

Recommended web-sites.

Obviously the site to go to first is mine – it’s a guide after all – the best (the only?) - but I also have punchy, burn-down-the-Ministry type editorials and articles and more. Had a world-first story in mid-May and have a couple more ready to plant out. Reuters beware – planorganic.com is a rising star - the site had 15,000 "hits" in its first month, without advertising. There’s lots of Irish material too and building – you’ll all be in it yet.

www.organicts.com is really a great organic news source. News – no editorials and some, a cranky few thank goodness, like it that way. If you subscribe you will get a weekly newsletter (in html format if you wish) usually on Thursdays. It’s very comprehensive and covers UK and Ireland, Europe and the World. They don’t miss much - they even covered my launch! Neil Butler is the main man there – perhaps the only one! The "ts" stands for Trade Services. And get it now – it’s still free but it’s too good to remain that way. Same applies to planorganic.com of course!

www.ngin.org.uk is a site for the really news-hungry surfer. If you subscribe to their newsletter (free) you will get several emails a day, most albeit, dealing with GM subjects but a lot of organic industry material too. And blazingly fast – news almost before it happens. Again, a very small organisation, but very effective. Jonathan Matthews is the contact there. Email; ngin@icsenglish.com.

Of the 750,000-odd sites on organic subjects out there on the Web, I’ll just mention one more, for the present, and not only for the fact that it’s been in the news recently because of a GM crop threat to its seed banks.

www.hdra.org.uk is the Henry Doubleday Research Association online. Excellent practical information on the site and also in their membership periodicals and catalogue.