Mel's Minute

Now that you’re a Certified Instructor, you can not only spread the word and get paid for it, but you can also sell many products that you can either buy at wholesale from the Foundation and sell at retail, or in some cases you can build your own once a sample is supplied and aproved by us, and then make your own copies of that product and sell to your audience.  The most obvious and available things to do are to get speaking dates at places where you can charge admission.  That would be nurseries, auditoriums for rent, sometimes churches, or other types of organizations that would hire you as a speaker.  If you want to give free lectures you can do that at any library or school building.

Back to  being paid for the talk. After your talk,  you can always sell books and videos.  There will be an occasional library that says no, but we’ve been to many libraries that said yes.  As a thank you, we always donate a few books to the library and in an audience of 100 you will probably sell 30-40  books or videos.  If you buy the books wholesale at $14/copy and sell them for $20, you do the math.  I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

Other opportunities would be to open your home SFG to the public with a paid tour, maybe $5/person and you might have 10 to 20 every Saturday (again, do the math).  You could have a workshop every week to show everyone what’s next in your neck of the woods.  What to harvest, what to replant, how to compost…all those kind of easy things from your SFG knowledge.  This could last the whole season from Spring to Fall and if you have a good group of beginners, they would most likely want to buy all of the products for their garden directly from you.  We have a planned program for all of this and I hope you will consider starting with at least free talks at the library, then do some at your church, office, school, even at the local colleges for the continued education programs.  Next would be finding a group that wants advice on starting their own SFG.  You might even consider finding vacant land and starting a community garden.  This idea would also be possible at local nurseries that would have space way out back.  I’m going to keep sending you other ideas, so look them over and make the most use of all of the effort and study you’ve put in to becoming a certified SFG Instructor.  We are very proud of you and all of your accomplishments so far – let’s see how much we can all do together to spread the word of SFG.

If you are doing these things or more, why not share them as encouragement to others in our newsletter.