Awakening the sleeping blogs, #2.

The Kansas Produce Co-op... was created in 2006 in an attempt to organize groups of young farmers and gardeners into actual small businesses, selling their own home-grown produce at produce stands.

Here's the back story... it was going quite well in the early stages.

I contacted FFA and 4H leaders around the state and got a very good response at first... they thought it was very good plan, to help students build a complete system that taught them how to convert their own hand-grown produce into cash crops, from seed to sales booth. I found places for the sites, organized some merchants to help fund it and thought it was going to fly.

And then I committed the ultimate error, at least as farming in Kansas and the midwest goes.

I mentioned the word "organic."  It was just one idea among many, that students might be able to earn more from organic items, and should consider trying it. While I have ideological roots in organic farming, it was just a side bar at the time, not at all "political," admittedly, it was just practical marketing.

You'd have thought I dropped a stink bomb.

At the drop of the word "organic" every single one of those instructors ended all communication with me, except one, and she only filled me in on the "organic" blasphemy because she was resigning due to similar provocations.

Apparently, the influence of chemical farming advocates has become so entrenched in our schools and young farmer organizations, just the mention of the word organic sent up red flags across the board.

Needless to say, it was a hard lesson in terminology for me, I never anticipated a single word would elicit such concerted and desperate response.

Awakening some sleeping blogs.

The first of my inactive blogs I'm restoring to activate status is
"Stackwood Acres."

Over a decade ago, while I was managing property in California, I helped a group of soon-to-be retirees formulate a plan for their retirement.

In the process, I created a flier on an old Macintosh, and the original files are all long lost.  But I found the flier and scanned it in, and here it is as a blogsite.

The idea was for people to join with other retirees in purchasing the property and building these stackwood-style facilities together, as a community.  In the end, this plan is even more purposeful today than it was then, everyone involved could find a cheaper way to retire and live the vacation lifestyle they once dreamed of before the crash of 2008.

But this could work only as a community, operating as a commercial RV park/club with their own parks.  The residents who invest in the properties could also sell memberships as part of their retirement income.

One of the changes that developed that did not appear in the brochure was the addition of a Flea Market to each local branch of this enterprise, so the members have a place to make some extra money on weekends if they want to create or grow something to sell.

One of the advantages of having a broad geographic distribution is that members themselves could travel seasonally if they choose to.  Plans included a gardening crew preceding the seasonal influx, planting u-pick produce gardens at each property for sale to campers by the members.

NEXT WEEK'S FEATURED BLOG ACTIVATION;
THE KANSAS PRODUCE CO-OP

DON'T GO DOWN THIS RABBITHOLE!

If you get started, you never know how far you'll go.

There's been no traffic to this blind site, I haven't promoted it yet, but will do so very soon.

I am still dangling this little paragraph of comment-bait out there, unpromoted anywhere else but right here, to see if some chance shark or bluegill happens by.

So if you read this and you didn't hear about it somewhere else, you somehow just stumbled onto it, leave a comment on how you stumbled onto the place before it went public.  I would love to know how it happened.

If you stay tuned, and watch for updates and directions, you will get a chance to dig much deeper, and the secrets that lie hidden in the future progress of this blog will be revealed.

The time has come. My memory isn't getting any better, and of late I have been reminded quite graphically of my own mortality.

So I'm determined to start keeping this journal, to get into text what my memories still recall, and reach out to try to find some of those characters lost along the way.

The advent of social networking, which I will do in conjunction with and to promote this Blogo'Blogs, gives me an opportunity to accomplish this, and in doing so, also amalgamate all my blogging onto this site, which is basically a blog of all my blogs, so I titled it Blog o' Blogs.

The links to other blogs will take you to the extreme ends of some of my myriad ADHD rabbit holes, maybe there are some seeds of reason hiding midst those briars and brambles that you will find worth keeping.

I invite you to comment on any of them, but especially here on the Blogo'Blogs. Let me know what you think. It will help me determine where my issues and ideas matter, and which blogs just aren't interesting enough to generate any response, good or bad.

When I get comments on any of them, I will respond, and some of those many old blogs will be inactive just as they have been for years, others will get some occasional, even intensive input because they are not only still pertinent but essential to my purpose of utilizing the web to piece together the story my memory is losing all too quickly.

I know there may be some downside to what I am about to ask, but it is the only way to get the upside: if in the process of reading any of my posts, you recognize someone you know or even yourself, as one of those characters I've lost to time, or if you remember anything at all that is related, please email me directly at jepatt07@gmail.com with your observations and connections. I know there were so many peripheral characters swirling around the main ones we remember, and sometimes they saw more than those who were immersed in it.

Hopefully, this log will help me piece together some of the blank spots that are nagging me in my memory these days.

This will also be the place where I publish my weekly "Emails to China", that blog is about to get started, along with my first video blog, Rough Hewn, also a music audio blog where you can download some of the accompanying original music...and you can find it all here on the Blogo'Blogs.

Stay tuned, and don't feel at all reticent to click the ads on my pages, part of what Blog o'Blogs is about is monetizing my Blogger experience, I'm seriously curious just what sort of traffic I can generate, and while I don't get to choose the ads, I hope the people at Google who pick those ads are wise in their choices. And that is the last and only time I will talk about that.

That being said, if you represent anything I can feel good about promoting, contact me and we will entertain some advertising options. I can post anywhere among the blogs someone might find appropriate. While I can't choose the Google ads, I can post anything else, including most advertising, so keep that in mind if you think it might help get your cause or product some effective exposure.

If I'm going to let Google pick their ads for me, then I'm going to use my own space for any ads I find compatible with my own message. Some very successful blogs use this formula quite efficiently.

If you happen to read this somehow before I publish the "Grand Opening" announcement, comment on how you got here if you would, and of course, please check back in and watch the progress, I'll find a logo and put up the links to the other blogs next.

I'll be making an introduction text box out of this first post, please comment on that post all the way at the bottom of the blog, if you have any input.