Welcome to the Bloom Room!
What is the Bloom Room ?
The Bloom Room is designed to create a space for more in-depth learning, for sharing projects and ideas, for seeking advice and discovering opportunities.
Ultimately, it aims to build a more intimate, interactive, and actionable relationship between members, a way for the Bloom Room community to support each other’s projects and learning journeys, and to encourage and facilitate the design, build, and management of more regenerative landscapes across our planet.
What you can expect as a member of the Bloom Room
As a member of the Bloom Room you can expect;
Access to an interactive forum where you can ask questions, start discussions, direct what type of content you would like to see as well as share your own content and projects.
Live sessions featuring , discussion, Q&A, member presentations, guest speakers, design tutorials, and consultancy.
Full Access to all of the content on Substack including all new content for the seven content categories. Polyculture Profiles - Travel - Plant Selection - Regenerative Design - Research and Trials - Fruit & Nut Growing Guides .- Preparedness.
500 EUR discount for full enrollment to our 20-week Regenerative Landscape Design - Online Interactive Course where you will be guided from start to finish in what you need to know to design, build, and manage regenerative landscapes. Perfect if you are looking to start a career in regenerative landscape design or if you have a property you would like to regenerate. More information on the course here.
How to Become a Member of the Bloom Room
As a paid subscriber to our Substack, you are already a member. If you are a free subscriber, it is as simple as upgrading to a paid subscription. If you have not subscribed yet, you can do so below. The annual subscription is currently $70 and the monthly subscription is $7 (monthly subscription excludes discounts for products and services)
I understand that paying for an annual membership is not possible for everyone, and in the open source spirit that we have always aimed to practice, you will still be able to find all of the current articles from our Substack on our blog here, and there will continue to be some content on Substack that will be open to everyone.
What The Bloom Room Membership Fees will Fund.
After Substack and Stripe (the payment processor) have taken their commissions, each member’s annual subscription will provide approximately $55 per year per member. If 2000 of our readers become paid subscribers, we would have a reliable $110,000 annual budget to further the quality, reach, and impact of the Polyculture Project.
So let’s take a look at what we’d use the funds for, based on reaching the 2000 members target.
All funds we have received via paid membership so far are used to cover the costs of development and maintenance of our existing research and demonstration gardens in Shipka. Our ultimate goal is to provide salaries for two garden managers and a dedicated ecologist to monitor and record the flora and fauna of the gardens
Garden Managers
37 Weeks - $34,000
Lead Gardener $22,500 - Assistant Gardener $11,500
Duties include caring for our three main forest gardens from mid March - early December including, new plantings, biomass management, irrigation, new bed development, labelling the plants on ground and on digital maps, pruning, harvesting and recording the productivity of the gardens.
Ecologist - Wildlife Record Keeping
31 weeks - $17,000
This job entails weekly field work from April 1 to November 1 documenting biodiversity within the gardens, specifically botanical and entomological surveys, soil tests, and biomass growth monitoring.
Project Management, Presentation and Dissemination
52 weeks - $32,500
This is the type of work I really enjoy, identifying the tasks that need doing, making sure they can be done well, taking the information gathered, the photos, the records and drawing from it useful procedures and protocols and presenting it in a digestible manner that others can easily follow or, in some cases, highlighting problems and mistakes so others can avoid making them too.
Bloom Room Community Fund
$27500
This is the part where it starts to get very interesting. I have been asking myself a questions over the last few years. Is it possible for a group of strangers from anywhere on the planet to get together to create and manage regenerative landscapes?
The short answer is, it is definitely worth trying. The long answer is 80 000+ words, a folder of spreadsheets, and a few more 1000 hours of brain-aching editing, but it is in the works and I am very excited about the prospect of funding and running this experiment with the Bloom Room Community.
The plan is to use 25% of Bloom Room membership fees to purchase land somewhere in the tropics, land that will be owned by the fund members and will be used to experiment on how to coordinate the regenerative design, build, and management of the site by a community of people around the world. I have already looked at potential sites in Sri Lanka and Tanzania and I’m currently visiting Indonesia this summer (2024) and will probably extend the search into Malaysia seeing as it is so close and the foreign land ownership rules are more straightforward.
To be clear, the fund is not capped at $27500, this is just the start. It will include 25% of all funds raised from membership fees beyond the 2000 subscriber goal and for all subsequent years.
The Bloom Room Community Fund has the potential to be a truly innovative approach to landscape management. Once we reach 1000 members, I'll unveil the specifics of this plan, detailing our commitment to transparency and how as a member, your ownership share won't just be symbolic—it'll be tangible and fungible, whether you actively participate or support from the sidelines. Stay tuned for the details!
Finally, I’m excited about the Bloom Room's potential to fuel regenerative projects, and explore innovative ways to create regenerative landscapes together. Looking forward to it !
Happy Growing!
Maybe sounds like a dumb question but I'm new to substack and still learning how to navigate it. I'm an annual subscriber to the polyculture project substack and I wanted to know, am I already in the bloom room forum here?
If you don't mind me asking, how come you don't just have everything on here in the one app to keep it simple?