Why Gardening Has Made Me Feel Like I Am Planning An Event
From the desk of: Carrie Dirats
Many of our clients and fellow event professionals have been asking themselves and each other “how do I keep my skills sharp when I’m not onsite running events?”. My answer to that is “gardening”. It’s not really as bizarre as it sounds and is a nice mental break from running through imaginary event scenarios to stay sharp!
A good garden, like a good event, requires a great plan.
In either case, you need to decide how much physical and budgetary space you have for plants….ehrm, guests. Then you select the best location based on the size of your guest list and what type of feeling you want to create. Bohemian, beachy, sleekly modern, or moodily romantic, etc.
Then comes the fun part of determining the exact elements you want to include in your space, laying out your floor plan (dirt plan?), placing orders for everything you need…and checking it all twice. Of course, with an event, you can’t just run to the local nursery to pick up anything you’ve forgotten!
Event floor plan executed on Social Tables
Garden plan executed on Mother Earth News Garden Planner
Seating & Spacing Considerations:
Seating locations and guest placement have always been a tricky part of any event. Ditto with gardens, not all plants play nicely together, and each has its own personality and needs. Aunt Polly doesn’t like crowds and worries about tripping over small children so we seat her in a quieter area away from the kiddos….spaghetti squash requires a lot of space and the garden should be arranged to allow it to stretch out its legs away from smaller plants. Uncle Bob is very tall, so perhaps he should be placed toward the rear of the space...just like the cucumbers are placed in a part of the garden so that they don’t block the peppers’ view of the sun.
Emerging out of this pandemic, it will be interesting to see how these space considerations for in-person events change. Will we need to seat fewer guests per table, increase spacing between tables, or use larger spaces for standing receptions? At least I know my beets will still be happy planted with eight other beets per square foot!
Scheduling:
When it comes to scheduling, a garden can be just as demanding as any event…it just all happens more slowly in real-time. My vegetable garden is succession planted. This requires knowing how long each crop will take to grow and produce, and then creating a plan for what can fill that space after the plant is no longer useful or beautiful. Just like all well-laid plans, sometimes things don’t work out as we expect. Whether your VIP keynote speaks for twice as long as they were scheduled to, or your beets take three weeks longer to mature, you always need to have a “Plan B” ready to go. Because you have more time to think through the best options, gardening is a great stress-free way to develop those “if/then” thought processes before bringing them up to the lightning speed of a live event.
As so many of us have discovered, there are many creative ways to keep your skills sharp during unusual times. Sometimes you just need to think more than a little outside of the box. My recommendation for freshening up your skills this spring is to plan a garden, then get outside and dig in the dirt!