The informal Gardening Boosters group I started in January planned to have all sorts of in -person gardening events here in Old Greenbelt, Maryland. When those ideas became impossible this year, we turned to the trusty old Internet to create a reasonable alternative, hoping it could serve the same purposes as a normal tour. But it’s proving to be different in more ways than just the virtual bit.
More Tours
Instead of just one tour, we’re having a Spring, a Summer and a Fall Tour. The Spring Tour is now online!
More Gardens
18 gardeners submitted photos or videos for the “tour,” which includes another 5 gardens I snapped photos of from the street on my walks and rides around town (my gym’s closed, of course). In-person tours would include no more than 12.
More Gardening Friends
Best of all for the organizer – yours truly – has been getting to meet more avid gardeners who live near me. For example, I’m getting to know Rashi Jain, whose front-yard organic veg garden is amazing. And she makes videos about it Here’s the first of her two spring videos.
Many In-Person
Many of the gardens are identified by address and visitors are encouraged to see it from public space. (Like my own garden and Rashi’s, most or all of these gardens can be seen from sidewalks along the front and back). So some in-person visits are possible. A few of us even invite visitors inside the garden and make ourselves available to answer questions, if arranged by email first.
For example, visitors can see this charming container-veg garden from the sidewalk.
Same Income
Since our tours are always free, we’re not losing any income by going online. I know that’s probably not the case for most tours.
Less Work
Collecting photos and descriptions is a normal part of garden-tour planning, followed by the printing of brochures, organizing volunteer docents, et cetera. Virtual means avoiding most of the actual event planning and ALL the worry over weather!
More Tour-Goers?
We don’t know yet how many “visitors” we’ll eventually have to the tour page, but I’m guessing it’ll be more than the number of attendees for our in-person tours, on nice weekend days when they have so many other choices.
How our Garden Tour Went Virtual originally appeared on GardenRant on June 12, 2020.
The post How our Garden Tour Went Virtual appeared first on GardenRant.
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