Personas

Personas are a tool for imagining the sort of people who will use your product. These personas can be useful for product development and marketing purposes.

Quick list
Here's a quick list of some types of people who might use Growstuff. We can build personas from here.


 * Individual home food gardeners
 * Established
 * New/learning
 * People with rural acreage or hobby farms
 * Community gardeners (shared gardens or allotments)
 * People gardening with kids (including school gardens, homeschoolers, families)
 * Alternative tech enthusiasts (eg hydroponic gardeners)
 * Small commercial producers (eg. people who mostly grow for themself but who also sell produce/jam/seedlings at small markets)
 * Businesses trying to reach any of the above (eg. seed companies, permaculture designers)

(As a side note: we generally consider larger/commercial food growing operations to be outside the scope of Growstuff.)

Edna the established food gardener
Edna's had a home garden for years. She's married, and lives in house with a decent sized garden, where she and her husband have built a considerable vegie garden over the years. (Although her husband also works in the garden, Edna's the main motivating force behind it.) They have culinary herbs, winter and summer vegetable crops, and a couple of fruit trees. Edna saves seeds and makes cuttings when she can, but she also buys seeds and plants from garden centres or from seed catalogues and the like. She cooks with her own produce, sometimes makes preserves, and shares extra (especially zucchini, which tend to get out of hand!) with friends, family, and neighbours. She's in her garden most days during the peak times of year, doing the odd task and checking on her crops, and she has a busy gardening day every so often when she and her husband work together on heavier tasks.

Edna has been a member of various gardening clubs, vegetable swaps, and similar groups over the years, though she's not active in any at present. She reads gardening books and magazines (some she buys or was given as gifts, some she gets from the library) and also searches online for gardening information, using Google to type in questions or terms that interest her. But her main source of gardening information is just chatting with gardening friends, who commisserate over the weather or offer tips along with spare seedlings.

Norah the neophyte
Norah is a young woman who works as a web designer by day and makes art prints, which she sells on Etsy, as a sideline. She lives in an flat in a recently-gentrified urban area. Her flat has a small courtyard out back, and a little balcony area in front where she parks her bicycle. There's room for a container garden, and she's been reading and hearing a lot about locavorism and the benefits of growing your own organic food. So, she wants to grow some!

She has a couple of books on organic container gardening that she bought on Amazon, and has found a few good blogs and tumblrs with ideas and tips. Her first attempt was just a few herbs on the windowsill, but they didn't last long. Next, she asked a friend with a car to help her out, and with a pile of freecycled/craigslisted containers and a lot of potting mix, she's going to try growing tomatoes, kale, beans, salad greens, and more herbs.

Norah's pretty busy, and it takes special effort to remember to go into the courtyard often enough to water the plants and keep an eye on them, so they tend to get a bit straggly and wilted. Still, she's ecstatic when she gets her first tomatoes (she posts jubilant pics on facebook), and she comes up with all sorts of recipes for kale salads from her favourite food blogs/tumblrs/pinterest. It's a pity that salad greens all went to seed, and she's wondering what she did wrong there, but figures she'll try again next spring.

Norah doesn't belong to any gardening clubs or groups, but she does swap notes with people online through her existing social networks, and with a couple of other friends she knows locally who have gardens quite like hers.

Hal the hobby-farmer
Hal and his family moved to the country eight years ago to improve their lifestyle. They've got a small rural acreage which used to be part of a larger farm, but now they just have their house, garden, a small orchard of fruit trees, some chickens, and a back paddock that they're not sure what they want to do with, but are thinking of maybe getting some sheep.

Hal and his wife had had a small vegie garden -- a single bed and some containers in the small yard of their townhouse -- before they moved to the country, so they weren't starting completely from scratch. But growing in the country has its own challenges: learning the different places to get supplies, caring for the fruit trees, having a real compost heap for the first time, and learning how to do things effectively at a larger scale. The first few years were full of mistakes and wasted effort, but things are more established now, and more productive. They eat mostly their own vegetables, supplemented from nearby farmstands and occasional purchases from shops, and are more than self-sufficient in eggs (they usually have some to give or swap with friends and neighbours). They are out in their garden daily, because they have to walk through it to feed the chickens and fetch eggs, so they can always keep an eye on it and do whatever's needed when they see it.

Hal and his wife both work from home, in different jobs, while their two kids go to school nearby. This gives them lots of flexibility for gardening/animal-keeping, and their kids help out quite often. Hal's a writer, and keeps a blog where he posts about his work. He doesn't write about his hobby farm very often. Hal has been using the Internet lately to research greywater systems, and his wife has been looking at breeds of sheep. They've both been looking for a new stove, since the old one's on its last legs. Their internet connection is a bit flaky, and they can't watch streaming video (unless they want to pause it and eat dinner while they wait for it to preload), but it's good enough for their needs.

Hal and his wife have half a shelf full of books about growing food, keeping chickens, and other self sufficiency topics, many of which they bought when they were only dreaming of moving to the country. They subscribe to a local hobby-farm magazine and usually go to the local agricultural show each year to look around, meet people, and see what's going on. Hal has a bunch of bookmarks in his browser for useful websites and blogs, which he visits from time to time, but when he's not working he prefers to get away from the computer.