NancyVanReece.com » Garden

sleep garden sleep

NVanReece — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:00:28 +0000

San Ysudro, patron of farmers and gardeners

Pray for an abundant Spring to come on this chilly Winter Solstice

(watercolor by Nancy VanReece – prints available for $35)

A day in the garden is a very good day

NVanReece — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 00:48:08 +0000

A river runs through it

NVanReece — Mon, 03 May 2010 15:39:17 +0000

photo by kelseywynns

Nashville. May 1, 2, 2010:

Rivergages.com - Current Hydrograph For Cumberland River at Old Hickory Dam, TN

Twitter and YouTube Tell the story via Mashable

Our backyard:

The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee has activated a fund to help those affected by the May 1 & 2, 2010 floods.
In partnership with Davidson County’s Office of Emergency Management, The Metro Nashville Disaster Response Fund will assist those recovering in Davidson County.

Make a gift today. The needs are great and will continue for months to come. Grants from the funds will be made to nonprofits supporting both immediate and long-term needs.

We hope you will join in these efforts to rebuild lives in our very own community.

Help us spread the word through social media
by posting to your profile:

The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee activates disaster response funds to support flood relief in Davidson County and Middle Tennessee. Help support relief, restoration and flood clean-up efforts. Donate now: http://www.cfmt.org/floodrelief/

RT: @CFMT responds to Middle TN floods. Join in efforts to rebuild lives in our community. Donate at www.cfmt.org/floodrelief/

Building a network is a lot like gardening

NVanReece — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:55:22 +0000

Over the course of four seasons, yes we have all four of them here in Tennessee, a gardener goes through a series of planning, changing plans and then, more often than not, throwing out the plans all together.

It takes a seasoned gardener to realize that that the plants themselves have their own plan and the role of the gardener is to tend to their needs, not our own.

Over the last 26 weeks I have been tending to and rebuilding my network. I’ve talked to just about everyone I know and asked them to introduce me to someone I don’t yet know. I’ve gained real friendships during the last six months, I’ve rekindled ones that shouldn’t have been left unattended, and I’ve learned the lesson of the garden: It’s not about me.

Offering help is the best way to find the help you need. You may experience all four seasons in one single day.

How does your garden grow? Leave a comment about the way you build your network. Or a good spring gardening tip!

It Takes A Garden ..to grow a community

NVanReece — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:11:23 +0000

Joan and I have had a several gardens, some small succulents, some large herbs, some tomatoes, plenty of flowers. Our current garden started the week we moved into the house. Our process: rope it off, plan it out, think about the soil, think some more about the soil and get started tilling and planting.

Our perennial garden is full of bulbs from Brecks and everything else … everything else … is from Bates Nursery. Nashville is fortunate to have several high quality nurseries in the area but we have found a consistency of reliable variety to be a big factor in our choice of Bates Nursery.

If you have followed Contemporary Expression for a while, you’ll not be surprised that I strongly feel that everyone should have some form of a flower or vegetable garden as part of living an artful life. The act of gardening brings a balance and a peace to me that nothing else really is able to do.

I have enjoyed reading David Bates’ blog since his return to the family business it’s filed under News on the website, I get it in the newsletter form. When we celebrated our 20th anniversary in the spring of 2008 the kind folks at Bate’s had no problem taking us on under their gift registry as a same sex couple. They had to sorta rig it – but it worked.

When I started following Bates on Twitter I was maybe one of the first hundred or so that found them. As of today’s post they have nearly 19,000 followers. Because of the social media consultation work that I have been doing for both corporate and non-profit businesses in Nashville, I quickly acknowledged this success and sent David a tweet to see if he’d spend a little time with us on Contemporary Expression.

Here were his responses to my questions:

1. What one or two things do you attribute to your large follower base for your Twitter account? Diligence. I spend probably 2 hours daily working on my Twitter account. It all comes down to “The Law of Large Numbers” essentially. Follow new people, Un-follow people who have not followed back; repeat…Over and over. I also encourage new followers through our e-newsletter and my weekly radio show.
2. Do you know what percentage of your Twitter Followers do not live within range to purchase your products? Currently it is around 80% of total followers. I have worked very hard at attracting as many local folks as possible, but it is nearly impossible to gain purely local followers. There are still great opportunities for local growth. If only 3200 of our followers are local, that represents only about 1% of Twitter users in Nashville, TN. I do plan to have marketing opportunities through our website in the future, so hopefully there is a way to gain some benefit of this large percentage of “outside” followers. Again, “The Law of Large Numbers” applies. If I know I get 20% local followers from all follows, I will need about 80,000 total followers .to just reach 5% of current Twitter users in Nashville. That is a substantial number of potential local customers, somewhere in the range of 15,000. We should be able to reach that amount within 9 months, at our current rate of growth.
3. Do you have a social media strategy as a business? I have only begun making a push in the social media realm. I am planning to incorporate a video “how to” presence on YouTube (as well as our up-coming revamped website). Admittedly, our strategy to this point has been largely “seat-of-the-pants”.
4. What are your plans to grow your FaceBook FanPage? FaceBook is a different animal than is Twitter. Twitter is in my opinion decidedly more business friendly. FaceBook fanpages for business have built-in control mechanisms that Twitter does not have. I already spend so much time in the Twitter arena, I have sought to find the means to merge all of my social endeavors, Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn accounts. FaceBook required me to create a personal fanpage to make this work. I’m not really crazy about that. I don’t mind having a FaceBook page personally, but it is essentially an extension of my business fanpage. Our email address that was originally associated with our business fanpage, is now associated to my personal page. I really want these to be separate. I have solicited help on this issue from knowledgeable persons; haven’t found a viable resolution… yet. Until I am able to find some way to make a FaceBook business fanpage work better, I’m a bit stuck there.

David’s responses were enlightening to me. Diligence and Awareness are part of the life of a gardener. With this insight, I began to realize just how much a good social media strategy is so very much like planning an tending to a garden. The best fertilizer is a gardeners footprints.