Week 12

After a successful presentation to the class, I feel as thought our group has done so well in getting to the tail end of the project. I have never been one to leave things to last minute, but it always seems to happen. Now, I know that it will happen, but I am not stressed about it. The work we as a group have put in over the entirety of the project; from just chatting about the research we have done, what we would like to cover, and things we do and don’t like, too getting together to film, edit our productions, and just give each other a helping hand with the individual aspects of the projects we are in charge of, it has gone so smoothly.

At no stage was any one individual in the group coping with the weight of the other two. Everything we did, we did together. Danny and Mei have been great partners, and we have all been patient with each other when we get in our “do it my way” moods. This mature attitude allowed us to attack everything with a more relaxed frame of mind, and will, in the end, show in our results.

My Reflection

The end is finally here! Here’s my Reflection and the link to the final project 🙂

http://www.organictronic.host56.com/

Week 6

Big Week!

Document is now completed and we have all finished the individual research we wanted to do. Now to dive in to the production.

I have learnt so much already from the research stage of the project. Not only in the community of our chosen field, the people involved and who we may meet, but also because we are now starting to get involved in the community ourselves. We have all been growing some plants for about 4 weeks now, some have even started to sprout. I myself have chosen to try and eat as organically and healthy as possible. Nothing that I eat is my own yet, but the few herbs and smaller items I use, it is quite nice to be able to grab those from the garden, and know exactly where it all came from. I am starting to see just why this community is growing so rapidly! It’s simple, quick and extremely wholesome, good for the soul.

From here on out, we will mainly be focusing on the production aspects, like the videos and such, but it’s good to know we are still involving ourselves in the community, even if it is not our main focus.

Week 2

We have only just split up into our groups. Ours consists of 3 members; myself, Danny Mahoney and Mei Teo.

The great thing about our group, is we are all very interested in the topic we are pursuing, and have some (very minimal) knowledge in the area.This has made us made us very excited for this project.

Week 8

We have now started to dive head first into the production stage of the project.

The first of what we hope to be few interviews has been organised by Danny, with a family he met at a foodswap that are fully self sustainable from their garden in the suburban Geelong area. Emily also happens to be the person who organises the foodswap’s in the area, so we will be able to get a great sense of what the community in the area is actually like.

We have already started working on some tutorials, which will be hosted on the site Instructables. These tutorials are focused on the beginning stages of growing an edible garden, and being very quick, easy and cheap. Danny has a few ideas for things he can do (he has a large yard with plenty of room), and then I will be running the Instructables account.

Final Blog Post: Video Reflection

http://www.organictronic.host56.com/

The Final Post: Reflection

This is it! The end of our production. But for me personally this is a whole new beginning!

Every week I am finding myself more and more involved in the community surrounding organic and edible gardening and I will certainly continue to adapt this lifestyle. This has been more than a 12 week journey for me, this is a new beginning and I now aim to influence others into becoming involved in organic gardening. I have already donated some chili plants to my brother and he is looking into growing more things himself.

Challenges and achievements:

The biggest challenge that we have faced would have to be arranging interviews with organizations and individuals. Many groups weren’t very interested or just didn’t respond or get back to us at all. These groups were obviously only interested in doing their own thing and this was disheartening as this wasn’t what we expected from the community that we were reaching out to.

Looking back though, I am glad that things didn’t work out with the initial, commercial companies and organisations. Our biggest challenge effectively led to our greatest achievement: finding Geelong’s community of organic gardeners.

There were a few groups that we came across such as Geelong Organic Gardeners but this group was just a small part of the growing edible gardening/ organic growing/permaculture/self sustainable community.

In terms of the project itself I believe we managed our time and workloads quite well and this has helped us complete everything to our own satisfaction and on time, nothing has been rushed or unplanned.

This is the link to our final website from which all of our documentary content can be accessed:
http://www.organictronic.host56.com/

And finally, here is my reflection video where I briefly analyse our challenges and achievements during this production

Week 12: At the end? already?

It’s been a hectic week trying to get a copious amount of assignments done, but we’ve managed to find time to finish off our documentary. We’re all at my house today polishing of a few interviews and rearranging our home page. Surprisingly there isn’t much to get done. The interviews are pretty much edited. We just need to cut them down to a shorter time because at the moment, Emily’s and Mark’s interviews are running at 10 minutes, my aim is to cut it down to 3-4 mins so they’re easier to upload and watch. It shouldn’t take that long to edit as I’ve already edited the bulk of it so it’s just a means of making them look pretty. I thought they would be heaps to get done today, but it looks like we can easily get this finished by Friday!  Phew!

Week 11

Week 11 was the first time in the project cycle, that it felt like we were going to accomplish everything that we had planned. By the end of the week  we had all our footage gathered, our social media platform was being well utilized, and our tutorials were getting a lot of views. When gathering all our footage, we wanted to capture it as naturally as wee could, to show those we interviewed in a natural way, and just let them chat about  their hobby, and really get a sense of what it is like for those involved in the community. Just seeing how everyone is so passionate about it really gave us a burst of energy to deliver the best production we can.

A large sense of relief came with this week. With a project this long, sometimes it is hard to see how everything is going, but we were able to see it all come together.

Week 12

In my own garden FINALLY my chili are coming through which is awesome! I also transplanted some lettuce seedlings that I got from a food swap recently but strong winds and one very hot day killed most of these young plants. Anyway here are the chili:

Now that the weather is finally heating up my in ground garden bed has had some action. Some unexpected action too! I had included many vegetable scraps in my compost including potato peels. I have been adding compost to my garden bed and a few potato plants have popped up! See below

In terms of the production itself everything is falling in place now. We have the website to finish, the final video to finish editing and we need to keep active on the twitter account and finalize the photobucket slideshows…

Click here to view our slideshows
Click here to see the website
Click here to see our tutorials

I myself am often attending food swaps and the magic meadows farmers market. One key lesson that I have learned from all of this is that not only can eating and growing organic food be surprisingly cheap and easy, but there is a massive community surrounding the idea of an organic and sustainable lifestyle and the more you look the more you find… this is proven with how many free seeds, seedlings and tips I have been given. Not to mention my new local egg supplier 🙂