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  • I have a small backyard tree nursery which I use to grow rare species I give away to friends and acquaintances who have space to plant them.

    A lot of people don’t realize that climate change means species that we grew for shade historically won’t necessarily thrive in the future, and since we usually hope the trees we plant will live for 20+ years, we need to plan ahead. So I’m testing which species can be heat and drought tolerant enough to provide shade and other environmental benefits in the future.

  • to respond to my own post, i have set up a solar panel to charge a Jackery (mobile generator) that I am going to use to recharge my ebike when the charge runs down. photos forthcoming!

    we've also got seven birdfeeders up and running on our property, and two bee hotels. it's been over 100 degrees F where i live (rural western Colorado), so we repurposed an old hummingbird feeder to be a bug waterer, and used our local Buy Nothing group to find one of those pet watering bowls that refills from an attached jug. we filled the bowl part with rocks so bees have a place to land and filled the remainder with water, so now our bee hotels are right next to a bee waterer, too!

    here's a link to the image since i can't figure out embedding an image, embarassingly.

    bee hotel and a hummingbird feeder: https://flic.kr/p/2oRYzjN

  • We've got a vegetable garden going with tomatoes, pepper, kale, cabbage, onions, and eggplants.
    Also got a new pollinator garden bed started this year with Butterfly milkweed, a few different species of aster, sunflowers, blanket flower, rattlesnake master, goldenrod, purple prairie clover, Mexican hat coneflower, and some blazing star. Also scattered some sage and prairie clover seeds in a few other spots on our property. I've been sitting out documenting the various wasps and bees that visit us. We're also planning on harvesting seeds from stuff and giving them away/starting plants from them next spring to give away.
    Got some logs from our neighbors that I'll drill some holes in for the mason bees.
    We've got some old furniture that we don't want anymore that I'm trying to touch up a bit before giving it away to a local charity that gives people coming out of the foster system stuff like furniture and appliances to help them land on their feet.

  • I help run a communal compost heap, it's easy work and saves a lot of trash from going to the trash furnaces.

    • I'd like to learn more, how is it organized?

      • We got a place we can use on a square in our quarter. There's small houses and apartments nearby, so that's people who can't really compost at home easily.

        We have a compost bin with three bays of about 1.5 m³ each. The tools for turning are in whichever bay is most empty (pitchfork shovel sieve and broom). The bins have lids and we have fenced it. Then fence is to prevent trash in and around the bins, we did get a little before. Outside the fence we also have four big planters with vegetables and flowers in front. Ideally I'd want some water to water the planters and so people can rinse their buckets.

        It's intended for the people of our part of town, until we get so much we can't compost fast enough. In practice everyone who wants to join can. They get a 25 L bin to collect their kitchen scraps. There's two times a week people can come drop off the bins, an hour Tuesday evening and an hour Wednesday afternoon. The sorting rules are on the bins and an information plaque on the fence. We allow raw vegetable scraps, dead house plants, herbivore poop; we don't allow cooked food, cat poop, egg shells (salmonella risk), "recyclable" plastic (can't see if it's the correct kind of recycleable). The bins are large enough to be practical but also small enough that a lot of people can help.

        So the work us volunteers do is: open and close the gate; check the bins for wrong stuff; turn the compost when a bay is almost full (or whenever I want); get the small bins to people who want to join; care for the veggies or keep the area relatively neat. There's five of us so I only have to be there on time like twice a month tops.

        That it's only open twice for an hour has also made it a bit of a social thing, some stay to chat.

        City has asked if we want to start up heaps in other parts of town too. Probably will if we find local volunteers there.

    • I think that's a great idea, how did you get started?

      • A neighbour I didn't know started it. I just volunteered to help, she moved away, I have four more volunteers helping so it's nearly no work individually. It's a citizen initiative, but we did ask the city for free stuff, namely an Ecoo compost bin and permission to use that spot.

  • I'm growing watermelons! I started a little late but did all my tilling by hand with a pick-axe and shovel. Hoping to get enough to eat and make wine with!

  • Right now I'm working on reducing our individual plastic waste. I noticed that we've gotten careless and we produce a huge amount of preventable plastic trash, so that's for the next month the goal.

  • We grow a garden and keep different animals for food, land management and company. We learn to run our place in accordance with natural cycles, minimal external input (no we are far from perfect or even close!), maximal well-being of all inhabitants. Which basically means we have the non-human animals shit everywhere, collect some of that shit and dump it into the garden, grow stuff, feed everyone, repeat. When we get our hands on a nice plant species or variety we try to propagate and keep seed. We work on integrating mycology into the mixture and I'm proudly spreading spores and mycelium to hopefully help the fire-damaged landscape. So basically we increase biodiversity where we are.

    Online, I am finally learning how to leave the corporate internet behind again and help rebuild a net of the people. Started learning how to self-host and will use that knowledge to collect and disseminate knowledge online. I want to write descriptions of some of the things we do on the farm as they might be useful for future homesteaders, and am now setting up the virtual space to write, backup and publish comfortably.

    I take my kid out into the outdoors often and we identify plants and mushrooms and learn about their uses. We play music together because the world needs good music always.

    What I want to work on more is more contact with my local community (although I do see the non-human community as a community, I'm just not much of a people person in real life).

  • I'm a little late to this party, but we're working on homesteading / regenerating / solarpunking ~50 acres of central NY. Lots of foraging, gardening, a few sheep / goats / horses. Currently experimenting with letting volunteer trees grow sparsely in some of the large fields to see how things around them fare in comparison to full sun.

    We generate more power off of solar than we consume, and have enough storage to last indefinitely (if uncomfortably in the winter) off grid.

    We're slowly learning to make clothes from raw wool to woven cloth, and have a 200yo barn frame loom just waiting for enough spun wool to set it up.

    We teach like to teach and learn, so host folks who want to get their hands dirty. Renovating rooms in the house so we can host more folks!

  • The wife and I did some harvesting of Monarda didyma, then separated the flowers and leaves into jars to ferment a little before drying for tea and herbs, respectively.

  • this is the solar setup I was talking about, that I forgot to take a photo of until after dark, sigh.

    that's a Jackery Solar Saga 100 solar panel plugged in to a Jackery 500, which is charging an Easy Motion Evo Cross ebike. the ebike is my primary mode of transportation during the week, and I am hoping it to make my forever primary mode soon.

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