Ever since I started teaching in 2010, I have been agonizing over making or not promotional flyers for my courses. There are always many tricky hurdles to go through and many dilemmas…
- Do I really need to print flyers?
- How will I design them?
- How many flyers do I need? 50? 100? 500? more?
- My camera makes lousy quality pictures, should I buy stock pictures?
- Isn’t social media enough?
- Why not just advertising?
- What’s best for the environment…printing at home or printing with a commercial printer?
- Ditto, ink or laser?
- How is that impacting my wallet and the course budget?
- Etc!
One brutal reality is that I do not have the resources (time, money, skills, desire) to invest in designing jazzy flyers, in placing ads in prints or online, or in sowing social media platforms with a regular dose of blog posts, pictures and videos. I’d rather be out there smelling the dirt than staring at a screen!
Besides, I find computers humiliating now, for there are many skills this sometimes-useful-piece-of-technology proves me that I don’t have!
So, I am ditching the digital world every day a bit more and I am returning to a more analogue way of operating. simple living.
Overriding priority – make life simple
I made an inventory of what I have, what I need, and what I wish for in relation to this activity. To me, such an inventory is the starting point to any realistic permaculture design. Here is what it looked like:
| What I have | What I need | What I wish for |
| Computer | A good quality scan | A better camera |
| Laser printer | 100% recycled paper | A budget for advertising |
| Recyclable laser toner | Paper guillotine | Time to invest in learning graphic design |
| USB stick | 10 mins | Capacity to learn video editing |
| Basic photo editing software | Desire to learn digital marketing | |
| Pencils | Many more brains and hands to do all that while I tend my garden, feed the chooks, pick child as school, etc.! | |
| Scrap paper | ||
| Low to moderate capacity to draw | ||
| Desire to simplify everything! | ||
| Unconditional mission to not damage the planet further |
Because to me, living simply means living with what you have, it makes sense that I seek to optimise these resources that I already have to their fullest capacity.
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Simple living = living with what you have
So I went about drawing on a piece of scrap paper some elements that represent what is permaculture and I scribbled a text.
- On my way to school, I had the whole lot scanned at the local office supplies and services centre.
- I roughly cleaned the scanned file on a basic photo editing software.
- I printed it on 100% brown recycled paper.
- I cut the flyers to size using a guillotine borrowed from my dear friend A.
- I made twenty A5 flyers to start with. I can repeat the process when I need more copies, henceforth I do not create a wasteful stock of flyers.
Et voilà. That was simple, as it should be.
Permaculture teaches us principles to simplify our life’s processes and protect our natural resources. I feel I have done that.
And if you’re ready to simplify your life or want to learn permaculture…
- Part-time Permaculture Course held on our farm in Jilliby (NSW Central Coast) – 8 August to 12 November 2016
- Residential Permaculture Course held with John Champagne and Megan Cooke at Garden to Table in Pacific Palms, NSW – 19 November to 1 December 2016
