
The Field behind the Home Farm
Last week we started to plan the garden, as in what it will actually look like and contain. I started to sketch out a plan on graph paper, and looked at where the different beds would go, based on proximity to sun and shade. We had decided to use a cross design: 4 areas that would be bordered by paths in a cross formation. This will allow us to easily reach each of the 4 areas, approximately 4′ x 4′ in size. It was a useful little plan… and today it’s nowhere to be seen. Eesh…
We also have worksheets, printouts, resource books, lists, to-dos and shopping lists. What with travel back and forth between Lodi and Ottawa, and at least 4 people involved in this project, and the months of work we have ahead of us the potential for these plans and resources to get lost in the shuffle seemed fairly great.
So this led me to wonder if there might be a better way to organize all the materials and plans and thoughts and successes and challenges and lessons learned. Something that we can all access, wherever we are are, anytime. I thought of using a wiki to collaborate on this project and so Mum and I set one up today.
We used Google sites, a free way to set up a collaborative website, or wiki (like wikipedia), with your google account. It’s easy to use and fairly intuitive, though we got stuck a couple of times. We tried to imagine all the things we’ll want to keep track of during the season as well as monitoring our results for future years. Google sites allows you to do all of this, and also pull in gadgets like a google calendar and Picassa photo albums.
We decided that we’d need a page for resources and links, one for our layouts and plans, a to-buy list, a to-do list and an dashboard that will give us everything at a glance.
I think this will be a great resource for us and hopefully keep us organized and cut down on the possibility of lost items. It will also allow us to collaborate on this project as a team, and let us keep everything in one place and add, edit and update on a constant basis.