ETHOS

This is a weird business with a clearly altruistic orientation and prime directive. That prime directive is to proliferate San Pedro Cactus. The plan is to make available seedlings of interesting genetics as cheap as I can to encourage more planting, gifting, reselling, anything that gets more plants out there into the world quickly.

Whatever I am doing, I’m a persistent experimenter and innovator, so I am also planning to do a lot of experimentation to better understand and improve wachuma propagation and culture. You can follow this ongoing exploration by subscribing to the blog and my YouTube channel, Team Wachuma. Instagram @teamwachuma . I aim to make this a transparent project, so everything I figure out that is interesting or useful will eventually be shared for anyone to benefit from. That could very well make this project self destructing, but that’s okay as long as it serves the prime directive and that means more cactus, whether I grow it or someone else does.

My ethos is pretty simple.

Without the cactus, there is no cactus culture. Putting the cactus first honors the benefits we receive from it and fosters virtues that most would agree are positive: gratitude, generosity, humility and being part of something bigger than ourselves.

The culture that surrounds Wachuma is a living thing that is constantly changing. Every act within that community, good bad or neutral ripples outward and lives on to some degree. Act by act, interaction by interaction, we build what that culture is and isn’t. That is not empty rhetoric, it’s just true. What we do and how we do it is effectual.

You can support that prime directive of proliferation and my life of research and education, by buying seedlings in quantity and getting them out there. My hope is that lower prices will encourage quantity orders and large scale outdoor plantings like farms, hedgerows, privacy, noise, visual and security screens, living fences and firebreaks, as well as gifting, guerilla planting and other random acts of Wachuma. I invite you to consider what ripple effects giving even one single plant to the right person might create.

I would eventually like to donate or give away a certain number of plants a year, to veterans, community groups, for demonstration plantings and for establishing community genetic seed banks, but we’ll see how the project goes overall first.