Posters

Clara's Thoughts

Our group project with a concentration on Fredericton is about making people decide to grow a garden with food instead of having a useless lawn. It is important to create conscience about this because of the bad use people give to garden space. Lawns only have grass, when they could actually have a contribution to the community and the family in the house if only plants and vegetables/fruits were there instead. The contribution to the community is that when a person consumes food from their own garden, they are not promoting the purchase of imported foods from other countries, which is bad for the economy and society. Fredericton has a lot of spaces dedicated only to lawns, so the proposal of getting people in here to get to know about planting food is a good step forward.

Hello my name is Clara. My part in the ‘Grow Food, Not Lawns’ group project was to create and administer the Facebook page for it. Every week, new helpful and practical posts about gardening tips and such were posted in order to give a social approach to learning about this matter. I posted a simple yet informative description of what the goal of the group was in the Facebook page and kept a nice layout of it for the page to have a good appeal for people of all ages. Having a Facebook page for our group is necessary because this media is what people use the most nowadays, and it is a very efficacious way of reaching people. Facebook makes it very easy to transmit our ideas for the Food Not Lawns group, and I was glad I could keep it updated.

Oliver's Thoughts

In the aftermath of this group assignment I learned how to blog on the online site that we had created for whatever useful information we could pull up on vegetable gardens and how you should grow them instead of lawns. I was able to learn interesting information about the environment and how it is affected by us growing lawns along with the new skill of creating pull strip posters with contact information located on the bottom of the posters. Nearing the end of the assignment I learned how useful it could be for the planet if we grew vegetable gardens for the better.

I feel I brought the same amount of useful ideas and skills to the group as equally as everyone else helping out with the posters and what interesting things we could put on them to peak the readers interest. Along with cheesy catch phrases to sell them, I also being in the group with all the guys in the class along with half girls have brought a male perspective and mindset to the assignment as well. In the end I feel the group benefited from what I had to offer them in this semester. 

Bryden's Thoughts

Whilst working on this project that is encompasses turning any free and basically unused space to cultivate food. I had no prior knowledge on the particular subject previous to doing the project. As one of the contributors to our regular blog posts, I immediately started to pick up knowledge about the feasibility “Food Not Lawns” movement as I was submitting my part of our weekly posts. Mainly I learned that there are a wide variety of plants can be grown indoors as well as inside the house. Along with the fact of it not just pertaining to lawns but also urban areas of concrete/pavement being converted into a garden area. This one sociology project opened my mind up to the idea of Food Not Lawns and I am glad to have the new knowledge on this important social movement.

I personally worked on weekly contributions to the blog as previously stated. These posts consisted of strategies on growing herbs indoors such as the different varieties that can grow indoors as well as specific details that create your home into the most hospitable environment for plant growing. Also I shared stumbled upon some commonly unknown tips that consist of plant food solutions to some insects that will help your houseplant flourish. Additionally I submitted an entry on how to be successful in growing your own sprouts with precise instructions that will aid in a stress-free sprout-growing endeavor.    

Bryden

Homero's Thoughts

Hey Amigos!

Let me congratulate you on finding this piece of gold in the Internet! Food Not Lawns Fredericton is a group of St. Thomas University students that started because of a Sociology Class project, now? I think it is a bit bigger than that, the hits on our blog have amazed all of us and the fact that we reach other places of the world makes us feel happy and proud of our work. This group gives the opportunity for each member to exploit the abilities each one has, group members work in what they like to and to their strengths. We have regular communication and everyone is always informed of what is going on with the blog, which makes it easier to grow and improve. I hope you guys like our work and hope you get along with this great idea of growing your own food.

My name is Homero and I am from Quito, Ecuador. I am part of the Food not Lawns Fredericton group. I was the one in charge to create a promotional video for our cause. My grain of sand to the group was to try and figure out the best way to get our message out there and get the curiosity and interest the viewers. I decided to go with a simple straightforward video, no facts, or procedures on how to create your own garden that comes later. With my video I just answered a question, why grow your own food? The answer? Our blog, everything you have to know and all how have to do with regular updates. I guess my job was to get you interested and present you to the job of the rest of my group members. I choose to do these because I love making videos, and I know a couple of things on how to do them. If you haven’t seen the video here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYmDXwq6NIo. SHARE IF YOU CARE! Through this project I have realized of how easy and rewarding it is to grow your own food and is something I plan to encourage and hope you do it to!

Ryan's Thoughts

Food not lawns is a wonderful idea that has spread across the globe, from America to China this is a rapidly expanding concept. A couple months ago a handful of us started our own group here in Fredericton and it has been a minor success! We haven’t received the amount of attention I would have hoped for but we do have a base of people from all over the world who watch what we do! Our concept of the perfect front lawn is a fallacy! A falsehood! What’s the point of growing grass when you could grow food? A misconception that many have is that lawn care is easier than garden care, this is not true! From what I’ve learned if you grow the right things they will take care of them self! Another direction I’ve tried to take the group is city gardening, for example the pop bottle garden. I hope this project has encouraged people to grow their own, even in the city. Another thing I hope for is the continuation of this group, passing the reigns to another fist year sociology group may be a good plan. We’ve broken some ground with our group but it’s only the beginning, if this continues this could bear fruit. One semester is not long enough to get a whole community involved at the level I think its needs to be at. That being said we did a good job but I have high hopes for the future!

Hey everyone I'm Ryan. In our group I was the other blogger, that being said it was mostly Paige, I only know the basics of blogging! I researched some cool things like the pop bottle garden, Paige and I discovered egg shell seedling starters which were an awesome way to reduce and reuse. I like the use of the blog but I find it hard to navigate, Facebook is where I would have liked to see more people. I think we did well and people are a little bit more informed about things then before, so over all a win!

Gina's Thoughts

Hello bloggers! Thank you for following our journey on helping to promote why it is important to make your own gardens. This group and blog started as an objective for out projects in our sociology class at St. Thomas University. Our group was to plan and promote how people can have a garden and the benefits of creating one. In order to complete this project, our group had to meet on a weekly basis. We created a blog to help promote our group, “Grow Food Not Lawns”. We decided that we would like to set a goal for the blog; we wanted it to get at least 300 views. This blog reached 400 views and we have viewers from all over the world such as Czech Republic, Argentina and the UK to name a few. This blog far exceeded my expectations. I would have been completely content with having viewers from our own province, so the fact that we have people recognizing our efforts in promoting self-efficiency is incredible!

My job within the group was to find information to share with all of you bloggers so you can have facts about how to start your own garden whether it was indoors or out and also how much starting a garden would cost. As well, I researched some of the health benefits of growing your own garden. By doing just simple research, it really opened my eyes to how important it is to be able to have some level of self-efficiency. Not only do you get food that isn’t sprayed with horrible chemicals and is overpriced, but I learned that it helps to eliminate stress! Whether you have yard space or not is irrelevant because you can grow lots of different foods inside of your home. This project became more than a project for me, it became a new outlook on how I should be living my life. We should all take the initiative to try and grow our own food and to help promote it also!

Thanks for following the blog!
Gina

Two Of The Posters

Hey everyone, we apologize that the posters are not in color unfortunately we did not have access to a color printer. At the bottom it is a scan code for smartphones that leads you to this blog.

Zachary`s Thoughts

Hello everyone, as I’m sure other members of this group have said, we have been focusing on the Food Not Lawns movement, mainly in the city of Fredericton. Grow Food Not Lawns is a group devoted to the reduction of pesticides and the increase in home gardening. Rather than destroying good soil with harmful chemicals, why not create an ecological garden in that empty lot located in your front yard. Our group has been kept up via Facebook and a blog located on blogger.com. It has been taken care of by members who have been updating the blog and Facebook page, locating information in order to keep our group and our viewers up-to-date, keeping our group “in line” so to speak, and finally poster and promotional video makers as well as informants for people who do not know about the Food Not Lawns movement.

My name is Zac and I have taken up the opportunity to create posters and be one of the informants that I previously spoke of. My job was to come up with attention-grabbing posters, which to my surprise, was a little more difficult than I expected; and go throughout the university and find people to check out our Facebook and blogger pages – this was mainly done throughout my residence. This way we – our group – could find younger members who would hopefully become passionate about the Food Not Lawns movement and help bring this lovely city to a new, greener, more ecofriendly place in the world.

Emily's Thoughts

Food Not Lawns Fredericton is a group of eleven St. Thomas sociology intro students. Each student was given a designated task to complete and then report back at the start of the next week. Our group had it's own blog containing useful information about how to turn your lawn into a garden, we had a Facebook page where information and videos were posted and we had a promotional video for our blog, and posters were made to up around Fredericton to spread the word. The blog and the Facebook page have been very successful in getting the information out; we have had views from all over the world!

My name is Emily and I am one of the Facebook page administrators. I, along with my partner, set out to find information and helpful videos to post on the page. A lot of the information that we used came from the blog, we would only takes part of the information and then tell the reader that the rest can be found on our blog. When first beginning this, I never knew why it was important to grow food not lawns, but from finding all of the information for the page and watching videos on it, I actually learned a lot of neat, new tips. The page has been very successful in getting the public involved, we currently have over sixty likes on the page, and it keeps slowly growing!

Kristine's Thoughts

In honour of our sociology class we decided as a group that our goal would be to bring as much information possible that could be accessible to anyone and everyone who wanted to participate to the movement Grow Food Not Lawns. It was not always easy but we did manage to keep things together with a little effort from everyone. With such a big group, eleven to be exact, it was hard to find times to meet that would accommodate everyone so we decided on putting a Facebook group in motion to keep in contact and insure everything is going to plan. The blog was a bonus, we thought it would be great and accessible as well as being able to keep daily journals of our learning’s.

This was a very big group but everyone came in with a positive attitude and the same no-time-to-spare attitude. We got right to business giving everyone task to complete for the next meeting. We had the head blogger and her assistant sort to speak, then 3 blogger. He had someone making a publicity video and two other making posters that we are placing around Fredericton. We also had two of our girls managing and posting the best of our blog post to a Facebook page “Food Not Lawns”. My job was to coordinate all of these projects and assure that everyone had what they needed to follow through with the blog and other project. I was also in charge of coming into contact with multiple people for help, ideas and references.

All in all, our group worked well. We ran into bumps in the road but nothing that our group could not work out, it was wonderful working with them I am proud to say that we did a great job of getting our information out there.

Kristine