The group which started out as the St Clair Veggie Gardeners Group (see here for history) is now in its third year and we have a dozen or so people who regularly attend with a few others who drift in and out. The format is still the same, the first half is me or another presenter spruiking on about a particular subject for about an hour, then we break for coffee and cake & biscuits followed by a second hour or so of practical, which may be me or others demonstrating a skill or technique or it may be something everybody can have a go at. Either way there is always a practical component of each session.
I now have a very effective, if somewhat small, projector - the Samsung Pico SP-H03 LED - the size of a cigarette box which, unfortunately they no longer make. There were some problems with it and I had to take it back to the shop to get it looked at twice before the warranty ran out so maybe they discontinued making them for some reason. Also, being LED you really need a dark room for it to be effective, it can’t fight against sunlight.
I also have an Inca i3150 tripod and an Epson ELPSC21B screen, both of which fold down and are portable and all together make a reasonably professional and easily transportable kit for making presentations. The tripod also gets used when I am taking photos for articles so it is very handy to have around. As with a lot of things, you get what you pay for and a little bit more cost up front buys you better tools for delivering presentations, cheaper ones have less functions and don’t last as long.
Originally I would put a half A4 page flier in the St Clair Library and these would disappear over time, we got a couple of members that way. Recently, to try and drum up some more new members, I have left flyers with my mate Don at the St Clair Michel's Patisserie. The fliers, 1/3 of an A4 page wide, are printed off in colour and left on the counter where people buy their coffee. So far almost 90 have been picked up but I have had no enquiries.....yet! If you want to put out your own (perhaps more successful) flyer but want to use mine as a base, you can download it here.
The number of subjects one can cover in backyard veggie growing is limited and after a while start going over old ground and so, with the consent of our membership, at the start of this year we became the St Clair Sustainable Living Group. This has allowed the interests of the group to branch out somewhat and make my job of finding topics to talk on easier. We still cover some growing and gardening related subjects but also cover other things related to energy, water, food preservation and storage and low energy cooking.
At the end of the year, I draft a list of 25 or 30 topics we could cover in the following year and at the November meeting we discuss the next years’ program and pick out the most popular topics. Our program for 2013 is reproduced below -
- Preserving (bottling)
- Homemade beverages
- Growing and using medicinal herbs
- Alternative power supplies
- Soap making
- Water collection and storage
- Native beekeeping
- Improving energy efficiency of your house
- Preserving (Smoking)
- Black soldier fly harvesting
All of the presentations that have been used for these meetings can be downloaded here in .ppt format as part of the three presentation series and each month I put up the latest one. The first year's series I called "Eating the Suburbs", followed by "Eating the suburbs 2" (imaginative huh?) for last year and with the shift in focus this year I called the presentations "Sustaining the Suburbs".
Having done this for a while now I will say that it is a lot of work, and when I get home from work on the third Monday of the month I don’t necessarily feel like going out again. But they are a great bunch of people and it is very satisfying to be able to play a (small) part in helping them live more sustainably.
