Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

If you follow us on Facebook or Insta, you’ve probably seen some of our dodgy organic fruit-growing videos. We’ve been making them for years, right from back in the day when we were still known as Mt Alexander Fruit Gardens.

If you have, you’ll know that they’re very rustic. Clearly, we don’t aim for our videos to be super-professional. We’re definitely better fruit growers than we are videographers.

We don’t usually follow a script. We say “um” quite a lot. Sometimes the sound is a bit ropey (like in this video about what to expect in the garden in spring).

Making videos outside can be risky, to say the least. Without a proper microphone, a bit of wind can make a massive difference in sound quality.

But most of the time, that’s where we are. It’s also where all the good stuff happens that we want to share with you.

Not only are we pretty terrible filmmakers, but we also really don’t like filming ourselves.

So, why do we put ourselves through the mild torture of videoing ourselves regularly when we could be quietly going about the business of growing organic fruit?

The importance of organic fruit growing

We’ve been teaching organic fruit growing for a few years now. One of the things we wanted to achieve when we started was influencing how people approach food.

We’re all about encouraging people to grow their own, improve the soil, reduce food miles, and have a lighter footprint on the planet.

We mainly work with people at the very small-scale backyard level of food growing. But we’re also really influenced by what happens on a bigger scale.

We clearly remember a local event we were invited to. One of the drawcards was the ‘sustainable’ food supplied for morning tea.

In fact, every item on the table was imported, out of season, or highly processed. And there was no organic or regeneratively produced food at all. Food miles were not front-of-mind. The organiser’s version of ‘sustainable’ was to include some fruit and a couple of salads alongside the highly processed deep-fried offerings.

We could have wept.

Why does local food matter?

There are so many benefits that come from growing at least some of your own food. And when you’re buying food, it’s great to think about where it came from.

The simple choices we make are incredibly powerful.

They can make a real difference to your health and well-being, and the health of the planet. Our choices teach our kids to think about where food comes from.

Growing your own is best by far in terms of positive impact on your health, well-being, and the family budget. We’re pretty passionate about it, which is why we started the Grow Great Fruit program.

We’re also committed to making fruit-growing information easy for people to access, free or low cost, and not too hard for us to produce.

Hence, lots of homemade videos!

Why all the dodgy videos?

Video is an easy way for us to provide quick information. It touches people differently and helps us get the fruit-growing message out there more effectively.

It lets us share the farm without actually bringing everyone here.

So yes, you’re likely to see more home-made videos on our social media feed in the future. Follow our channels to see for yourself in real-time what’s involved with growing fruit.

You’ll also see that with the right guidance, organic fruit-growing is not that hard. If we can make videos, you can grow fruit!