This year has been the best of times and the worst of times. Okay, maybe not the worst. (after all, I am still employed).
But this is the dichotomy (or is it a contradiction?):
It is performance review time at work.
My review represents my “Goals” at work. And guess what. Nothing major happened. We are going through an Integration after being bought a couple of years ago. In fact, it is very likely that I will be facing downsizing in 2025 (that’s how it seems to go in these Integration situations).
So I just copied last year’s review and changed the project names.
But my Goals and accomplishments in real life were off the charts!
This year I:
– Built 4 web sites/side businesses
– Got my Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) from Midwest Permaculture.
– Gained my first 2 paid Food Forest design clients, including a huge 3 acre orchard design and implementation that is a several thousand dollar gig.
– Grew 10x+ trees and sold most of them, with people asking for more
– 5x my revenue from last year
– Learned to use a mini-excavator
How to Build a Side Hustle by Buying a Mini-business or a Pre-made Website
Back in February I bought a few websites off of Flippa. I talked about that on Ep. 118 – How to Build a Side Hustle by Buying a Mini-business or a Pre-made Website. These were all startup websites – with a ready made template, and often with (painfully obvious) AI written content. Now I could be like every “spin up your website with AI content and make $$” thing you see on line, but that is not me. So I am in the progress of rewriting the web sites.
I will deep dive into the lessons learned in a future podcast episode, as well as how to do affiliate marketing without selling your soul.
One of websites is All Garden Advice (AllGardenAdvice.com).
I have 3 years of homesteading blog content, so I rewrote the AI content and published the site with my stuff.
I also started Guitar Pedal Mania (GuitarPedalMania.com). Wait, what does that have to do with my main brand? Not much, but to survive as a side business empire (as my friend calls it), I look for opportunity in all kinds of places.
I was buying websites from Flippa.com, and I saw a guitar pedal website. As a guitar player, I was surprised to see that this is a Golden Age of US-made boutique guitar pedals, led by companies like JHS Pedals out of Kansas City and Walrus Audio Pedals out of OKC.
I couldn’t come to terms with the guy selling the guitar pedal site (plus he misrepresented his traffic numbers). So while I was waiting, I just spun up my own site – Guitar Pedal Mania. I quickly built an Instagram following. I will share my tips and lessons learned of how I did this in a deep dive in a future podcast episode and video.
I bought and setup a couple of other sites and did minimal work on them – one for off-grid living and one for home generators. They generate traffic, but they are projects that I will work on more in 2025.
Permaculture Design Certificate – PDC
I recently got my Permaculture Design Certificate from Midwest Permaculture. I really liked this program. It is mostly self study and then you meet once a week for 9 weeks. Then you create a big design at the end. I highly recommend it. I chose Midwest permaculture because they do a quarterly design review presentation from a student. I liked the approach and it filled in some of the gaps in my understanding, especially about swales and earthworks. I also liked that the Midwest Permaculture content focused mor entrepreneurial applications of permaculture. I got several business ideas just from the examples in class.
Grow Nut Trees
This year I grew 10 times the number of trees. I grew chestnuts, hazelnuts, and pecans, as well as apples, and persimmons from seed.
It started rough. The chestnuts that I had stored in buckets of sand in the garage last Winter were rotten when I opened them in the Spring. We had a very cold and snowy January. My driveway drifted shut three times.
I had the buckets of chestnuts against the outside wall in the garage and they must have gotten too cold and wet somehow. I obtained some other chestnuts, including some Dunstans, and I was able to recover. And I sold nearly all of my chestnut trees and had people asking for more.
This Fall I had a great haul of foraged chestnuts after a lean year last year. I also went to a U-Pick at Charlie’s Chestnuts in Lawrence, KS and got a guided tour from Charlie, the 74 year old owner. I picked a lot of Dunstan hybrids that I am sprouting out for next year, including a few Revival variety with nuts that are almost as big as the palm of my hand!
Dunstans are American and Chinese hybrids that have much bigger nuts, and drop much later than the Chinese varieties. They also frequently bloom later in the Spring and may be more frost tolerant since we have had early blossoming and late frosts here in Kansas the last few years. (In 2023 most of the local apple and chestnut crops were almost completely lost due to early blossom and a late frost).
Thriving Food Forest Design
In the Spring I designed a chestnut and hazelnut guild for a family in our local homesteader community. They bought the trees from me and we installed them as a community event.
Then in the late Summer I was contacted by a friend of my son-in-law, who said, “I hear that you have a system to grow food without a lot of maintenance? We want to add fruit and nut trees to a 3 acre pasture out at our new place. We want to focus on being more self sufficient.”
I designed an orchard with apples, chestnuts, hazelnuts, and pecans, blackberries and bush cherries.
Check out my design and my progress on ThrivingFoodForest.com.
Because of the uneven rains and frequent drought in Kansas, I designed in 160 feet of swales and planted the trees on the berms. To dig the swales I learned how to use a mini-excavator!
Foodscaper network
I also went to a career fair at The Foodscaper and joined the Foodscaper network.
I first heard about Matt Lebon and Foodscaping in one of the presentations in my Midwest Permaculture class.
Then Cormac of the Permaculture Vine Podcast recently had Matt Lebon on his podcast:
Foodscaping is creating edible landscapes. And most of the Foodscaper network focus on raised beds, arbors, etc.
What else will be new for 2025?
Grow Nut Trees and Thriving Food Forest Design are now my main side business revenue generators.
I will add affiliate options for Grow Nut Trees to get more referrals. Maybe you can drive traffic to my site and get an affiliate kickback.
I will have several different types of chestnuts for 2025, including several Dunstan hybrids.
I recently added Serviceberry and High Bush Cranberry.
Serviceberry is a bush that has berries that are sweeter than Autumn Olive, but it is not invasive.
High Bush Cranberry (Vibernum Trilobum) is a recent addition. I will see if I can adapt it to grow in Kansas, which may be a challenge. It may grow best in understory creek bottoms, similar to pawpaw.
Like the Foodscapers, I will be adding perennial kitchen gardens and raised beds to my Thriving Food Forest offerings and portfolio. What is a perennial kitchen garden? A kitchen garden is a small garden near your back door or in your backyard that you can pass by and harvest a small amount of veggies or herbs for tonight’s dinner. A perennial kitchen garden focuses on perennials – oregano, rosemary, walking onion, sorrel. Maybe some mint around the outside. Plant them once and they come back every year. And nothing beats fresh oregano.
What About the Podcast – Where Do I Go From Here?
With all of the above, I have not spent much time on the podcast. Since July, I have published only 1 or 2 episodes a month. This is because I have been super busy with class and all the other side hustles.
I wanted substantive conversations with guests, not just me talking. And I will continue with that model in 2025.
Blog Content is the main driver of search engine traffic
I am folding Thriver.News/ThrivingNews.com into Thriving the Future.
Before Perpend left for the monastery in 2023, he setup a side website called Thriver.News where I would publish the blog articles instead of on Thriving the Future. He thought that I could create a brand of people calling themselves “Thrivers” (sort of like the term “homesteaders”).
“Thriving” has been a consistent brand for me, but “Thriver” doesn’t mean anything to anyone. And it is not a searchable term. (Buzz…Major Fail!).
What went wrong? At the time I thought that the blog articles on TTF were not getting traffic and would do better on a separate site. I was wrong. I didn’t understand SEO and Google Analytics yet. Reading John McCoy’s SITREP newsletter and posts changed my mind.
John is a freelance writer and frequent guest on the podcast (he was on Ep. 75 – How to Reinvent Yourself as a Freelancer). John stresses that blogs are the main driver to your website – including podcasts. He is right! The number one driver to TTF from search engines isn’t Cyprian, or Toolman Tim, or any other guest. It is a blog article from 2022: What Sex Is It? – Chicken Feather Sexing Techniques. This had 414 visits Year-to-Date and 30 views in the last 30 days (even thought it is the “offseason”!). For a two year old blog article.
So, in retrospect, I didn’t accomplish very much at the day job (it is just a job after all). But I accomplished quite a bit in my personal life and side businesses. And 2025 will be even better! Stay tuned.
Thriving Food Forest Design: Let us create an edible foodscape, perennial paradise for you so you can grow more food and be more self sufficient. Schedule a free consult session with me at:
If you like this content and the podcast, here is how you can support the podcast and my Thriving empire of side hustles:
- Shoot me a tip on Venmo or CashApp @ThrivingtheFuture.
- Go to the Stuff page on Thriving the Future site and buy something.
- OR – click on one of the Amazon links on the Stuff page and then buy your other stuff that you want. Anything you buy on Amazon for 24 hours will give Thriving the Future a credit (a Piece of the Action).
- Buy comfrey crowns or cuttings on Grow Nut Trees. More trees will be available in Sept.
- Go to my other site AllGardenAdvice.com – Gardening Ideas and Tips, and check out the articles and stuff.
Chestnuts, hazelnuts, elderberry, and comfrey that are adapted to the Midwest.
GrowNutTrees.com
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