Cacao tree auction – rethunk

Okay, out of deference to Lewis who will be instructing us in the arcane art of growing and processing coffee in the comfort of our own backyards and homes, we have decided to move the Cacao Tree auction to the end of the our Saturday meeting, after his lecture and all the Qs and As.

As a result, this will be a Live Auction, with — to minimize confusion — one tree being auctioned at a time. At this point (obviously this is an ongoing, seat of the pants work-in-progress and could change entirely by Saturday) I think that once the auction has begun, bids most efficiently can be sent to your humble chair via the Chat function or by Hand Raising for a specific bid, like “I have a bid of $10. Do I hear $11?” (Do any chapter members have experience as auctioneers?) Once Tree #1 is sold, we will move on to Tree #2, etc. until all six trees are sold. I will invoice the winners with PayPal and trees can be picked up at the same location as last year’s plant sale and this year’s scion exchange.

If anyone has a better idea for how we should do this, please let us know!

Silent Auction for Cacao Trees Saturday, May 8th

The half dozen cacao trees kindly donated to us by Eric Durtschi after his Chocolate talk two months ago — and then carefully nursed to robust health by our own Bruce Blavin — will be sold at a silent auction during our Zoom meeting this Saturday. Since we have never run a Silent Auction on Zoom, your guess is as good as mine as to how (and if) this will work. But I imagine we can use Chat to enter bids (to Everyone!), starting at $10 with $1 increments. Since the trees are essentially identical, the top 6 bidders will win. One tree per person unless there are less than six interested parties.

I will invoice the winners. Bruce will drop them at my place (I hope) and you can pick them up there, unless you are closer to Bruce in Malibu, in which case you could fetch them all for us and save Bruce the trip.

Please note that trees much smaller than these regularly sell for $50 on Etsy. So support your chapter (and your chocolate addiction!) by bidding generously.

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