Crafting a Gardening-Focused Message

Jennifer Polanz

We wanted to provide a couple of quick resources to help you highlight the need for gardening during such a difficult time. One is from the NICH consortium of green industry members, which mobilized quickly to create memes that can be used by anyone and everyone on social media channels. You can find those at consumerhort.org. Once there, scroll down to the “Resources You Can Use in These Unusual Times” link. Don’t forget to use the hashtag #PlantsDoThat and tag @consumerhort.

The National Garden Bureau is celebrating its 100th anniversary (congrats!) with a throwback to a wartime era: Victory Gardens 2.0. The topic is resonating with consumers and the NGB has created a helpful, step-by-step guide for today’s Victory Garden. Find it at ngb.org/2020/03/23/victory-garden-2-0.

Also, don’t forget to involve the kiddos in that Victory Garden. Kidsgardening.org is a website and organization that offers garden-based activities for children of all ages, as well as gardening curriculum for educators.

Katie Elzer-Peters, owner of Garden of Words and a long-time Green Profit freelancer, has offered graphics for retailers to use on social media that covers messaging on everything from spring planting to veggies and curbside pickup. These are free to the industry at tinyurl.com/igcgraphics.

Meanwhile, an organization called Green America has enlisted the help of actress Rosario Dawson and urban garden enthusiast Ron Finley to create a video to encourage planting Victory Gardens. It looks like the video was created with climate change in mind, but it still promotes planting veggie gardens. You can find that video at greenamerica.org/climate-victory-gardens.

If you’re looking for more messaging addressing the economic and health benefits of plants, then America In Bloom has you covered. There are multiple studies written up on the website that promote the benefits of plants. Visit americainbloom.org/resources for those. GP