fundraiser idea - prioritizing categories

[epiphyte]

we all know the story of the tulip mania?  plant trends are rather fascinating.  

what's the biggest plant trend in the past 50 years?  i wouldn't be surprised if it was the recent trend in houseplants that happened as a result of covid and was facilitated by instagram.  personally, i enjoyed this trend quite a bit since it created a huge supply of some of the plants i've been collecting for many years, such as aroids. 

before this trend, when i would see ecuagenera at local shows, they sold like 95% orchids and 5% aroids.  now it's the complete opposite.  imagine if they had initially sold 100% orchids, then they would have been too late on the houseplant trend, and they wouldn't have been able to afford to buy their big properties in florida and california.    

my friend sells plants on etsy.  mainly houseplants but also a really wide variety of other plants as well, including fruiting plants that i've grown from seed... jackfruit, surinam cherry,  yellow dragon fruit and so on.  the other day she said that sales on my fruiting plants were picking up.  i told her to raise the prices.  i'd rather plant the seedlings in my public food forest.

maybe rare fruit is starting to trend?  if so, then how would ecuagenera know this, since it sells 0% rare fruit trees?  

in the thread i recently created looking for palm suggestions for the food forest, @WagnerMX mentioned that there are some palms with edible inflorescence.  it was the 1st time i heard about this, so i googled and found this pdf... edible palms and their uses.  it's a really long list!!  surprisingly long.  

right now palmtalk has quite a few forum categories, but there isn't a category for edible palms.  should there be?  

if you search the tropical fruit forum for "palm", there are 6,370 results.  that's a lot of palm talk that isn't happening on palmtalk.   

what was the original intent of the palm society?  i'm guessing that it didn't have much, if anything, to do with eating palms.  i don't think that original intent should really matter though.  

one of my favorite examples is mountainorchids.  he sells 0% orchids and nearly 100% begonias.  we can surmise, based on the name of his website, that his original intent was to primarily sell orchids.  but evidently he listed a few begonias, and there was a clear sales trend, which he followed.  except, now how will he know if the trend starts to reverse?  

organizations tend to suffer from the bias of status quo.  they suck at adapting, which is why new organizations are constantly being created.  the problem is pretty simple, organizations can't see the demand for change.  

what's the demand for a category for edible palms?   right now we can't see it.  but it exists!  revealing it is relatively easy via a fundraiser for the palm society.   we'd all be given the opportunity to donate any amount of money for any plant categories that we are most interested in discussing.  want to donate for a rose category?  go ahead.  mushroom category?  no problem.  coconut cold tolerance selection?  cool.  begonia hybridization?  sounds fun.  

in this way we'd see and know the actual demand for all the possible categories.   then what?  then palmtalk should adapt accordingly.   anything else would be putting the cart before the horse.  

lately i've been visiting palmpedia quite a bit trying to figure out if an edible palm can grow here.  every time i do so a panel magically appears on the right side of the page..."Please consider the number of times, you visit Palmpedia in search of valuable knowledge, and consider a small contribution to help support the hosting and engineering costs, that maintains our website updated, reliable, secure, fast and with your privacy in mind."   ideally it should tell me how many times i've visited, hah.  that would be pretty easy to do with cookies.  

a couple basic facts...

1. every organization needs funding
2. every organization needs to prioritize 

palmtalk could raise money by prioritizing categories.  palmpedia could raise money by prioritizing palms.  which is the most useful palm in the world?  coconut?  palm oil palm?  date palm?  there's an answer based on buying, and there's another answer based on donating.  i doubt both answers would be the same.  we can't buy palms that aren't for sale anywhere.  but we can donate for them, which would let people know that we want to buy them.  

a botanist i follow on instagram recently went to uruguay where he took pics of butia paraguayensis.  he made himself useful by taking pics of the palm.  but how much more useful would he have made himself if he had brought back seeds of it?  here are some seeds for sale.  i guess it can get kinda tall?  the point is, with prioritization via donations the demand for butia paraguayensis would be more clear, and this information would beneficially influence everyone's decisions.