Our First Free Seed- Scarlet Runner Beans

The decision has been made and seeds are being ordered today!

I have been doing a lot of thinking about what should be the first seed Sotall shares with the world. There are hundreds of choices and all would be great, but we are just getting started and anything that is purchased right now will come out of my pocket (which is not very deep). So I really wanted to choose something that would have a lot of bang for the buck.

I wrote a post a few days ago from my personal account on Scarlet Runner Beans if you would like to learn all the details about them. So I won't go into great details about them here, but I will list why I think this is a GREAT first choice.

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Why this seed is a GREAT first choice

1 - The seeds are expensive so a lot of people cannot afford to start growing them. (over $20 a pound with shipping, perhaps a few hundred seeds at most)
2 - For personal use, it would only take maybe 10 seeds per person, so even the small quantity can help a lot of people.
3 - They grow almost anywhere that gets enough sun and are a perennial in most places. The only bean perennial that I know of. If your ground freezes hard in winter, mulching can allow them to remain a perennial in most places. But even if they don't work as perennials for you, there is no reason why you can't save back a little seed for next years crop.
4 - Because these are so expensive, anyone interested in adding a little extra income could literally grow these, dry them and sell them next winter for a tidy profit. I think that is exactly what I am going to do with them. It will mean I won't have to buy anymore to give to our members, and I can sell the extras to make money to help get our stock of seeds built up for our members.
5 - Because these are such beautiful plants, anyone, even those who are in areas where they cannot grow a normal garden, can grow them along a fence, or even on a trellis in their front yard and enjoy the fruits of their efforts as a food source for their family.

That is a lot of bang for the buck and that is what we need with this community just starting.

What is Sotall

Sotall is a BRAND NEW community on Steemit. Literally, this is day 3. The idea started because I was buying some purslane seeds for my own use and found where I could buy 5000 seeds for only about $1 more than I could buy 50 seeds. I never pass up a bargain so I bought the 5000.

When they arrived the other day, I made a post offering to send a few hundred seed to 10 different people, for free. I would cover the postage costs.

Something I could not put my finger on kept nagging at me. I was missing something and spent a couple of days think about it. It finally dawned on me. Why couldn't we build a community on Steemit to accomplish MANY goals at one time. Of course we would all help each other make money with our posts, but why couldn't we go far beyond that.

Shorter Term Community Goals

1 - Provide an ever growing selection of seeds, free of charge to anyone in the world who needs them

2 - Provide all the knowledge and information people need to be able to plant, grow, harvest and save seeds for next years planting.

3 - Help community members learn (if they don't know how already) how to research and write articles needed in step two, and place them on Steemit so they can earn money also.

4 - Provide a website sotall.org to be a directory to organize all of the informational Steemit posts in one place so that knowledge is available at all times, and do it in a format that is logical.

5 - Move beyond just food to preserving, fermenting, water sources, water purification, solar systems varying from helping reduce electricity costs all the way up to running entire houses on them, building furniture or other household items, protecting your family for multiple sources, and so much more.

All of the above is already being worked on. The website probably will never be 100% finished because we need and want it to be constantly growing just like the seeds we are planting. I am sure, before we are through with all of this, there will be even more goals popping up.

What we need

1 - Posts about the knowledge people need. The directory is a little bare right now, lol.
2 - Tutorials on how to make money on Steemit. These need to be very detailed.
3 - Spread the word. We need Community Members.
4 - Bilingual Translators willing to translate our members posts into their native language so they are available to non-English speakers also.

One Problem with Communities

There is one problem on Steemit that I have seen popping up in many active communities. Some people decide to take advantage of the popularity of a community and drain off its upvotes for themselves without giving anything back to the community.

Community members tend to want to help all the other community members and this is GREAT, it is exactly what we want to have happen. But since no has to physically join a community, all they need do it use the community's tag and suddenly their non-community posts are popping up in our community feeds. Real members will upvote them without thinking.

So we ask everyone to give us their user name to become a community member and we ask everyone to provide at least one post per month to the community directory. You still earn the money from it, but it is linked from our website so all community members new and old can have access to it if they need the info.

We are keeping a community directory of member names, so if you ever have doubt, you can check to see if someone is a member before upvoting them.

That is it for now. Thank you all for listening and please think seriously about joining us at sotall.org. It only takes a second and you can get free publicity for your posts that fit our category.