TALK TOPICS

This is my gardening story from a city dweller with no garden and two very small children to 10 acres on the wild west coast, successfully gardening in a challenging location, with a decade of gardening on a 3 acre swamp in between, which was also challenging in its own way. This talk includes plenty the ups and downs and excitement along the way with many helpful hints and tips to take back to your own garden.

Knowing how to grow food is becoming a lost life skill that everyone should really know how to do, whether they choose to or not. Life can take unexpected turns and this in some situations this life skill can be key to putting food on the table. Let me give you some compelling reasons why growing food is important and set you off with the basics to get started. (This talk is also available in a Christian version with biblical based reasons on why and how gardening is a good thing.)

We live in an age where there is an overabundance of information at our fingertips and it doesn’t take much to find out what we need to do anything at all. However not everything on the internet is reliable or trustworthy and there is some really bad advice out there masquerading as helpful and useful. Gardening is not immune to this misinformation so we look at who does this, why they do it, how to find reliable information and bust a few common gardening myths along the way.

This is a full weekend workshop looking into all practical aspects of starting a garden from scratch and involves hands on activities like soil testing and seed sowing. Topics discussed include How Plants Work, Garden Style, Garden Planning, Pests and Disease, and more. Any of these topics can be separated out and presented as a stand alone 45min keynote.

This keynote was developed to present on cruise ships travelling to South Pacific Islands. It is generally given on the sea days before setting foot on land so the passengers can recognise the plants they see when they visit the islands and learn a little about some of the unique properties of each one. I am open to creating similar presentations on different plant groups if you need something of that nature, and would be excited to present on New Zealand Native Plants if you’re interested.

This presentation is a little niche, however it delves into my journey from an amateur blogger who hadn’t written anything since high school to a published author with three books to my name and a contributor to many magazines and publications. There are plenty of top tips, things to avoid and experienced wisdom on the road to writing a book.