answering my own question, i'm snagging a couple of old mountain bikes from a coworker and her husband who don't use them. going to fix them up a bit for myself and my wife, maybe make mine into a low-end bikepacking rig. i like that idea; we'll see how much stuff i can use from my own boneyard and what, if anything, i'll have to buy. good times.
hamtron5000
joined 2 years ago
to answer my own question, i'm installing some rainwater catchment barrels at my house hopefully this week. all but one (we have four) were sourced from local folks. once these are installed, i have purchased a zero-pressure drip irrigation system and am going to try to have that installed before the first big frost, usually about two or three weeks from now where i live. there won't be any water in it this season, but it will be ready to go in the spring - or so i hope!
lol, absolutely! it's a combination of this method (deep mulching, the Ruth Stoat method) and this method (lasagna mulching or lasagna composting).
what we're doing is laying down a double layer of cardboard, topping it with 3+ inches of wood chips, adding nitrogen in the form of grass clippings and, later in the year, leaves; and adding some manure, then seeding that mix with cover crops.
on the other side of our yard, we're going to do a more traditional lasagna method because we're running low on wood chips. this will be cardboard, an inch of woodchips, manure, and nitrogen. this will also be seeded.
in the spring, when our cover crops have bloomed, we'll chop and drop them where they are, adding more organic material to the soil we're building. finally, in that mixture, we'll plant the native wildflowers and food crops we're interested in growing and harvesting.
i've posted about this before, but here's our current progress on deep lasagna mulching our front yard. we just had an apple tree put in, and i have seeded the grass clipping-covered area of this part of our yard with cover crops. laughing wife for scale.
nah, go for it; i readily admit to knowing only what i have googled so far about things. i'm using cardboard because it's what i have; i am also composting, but buying stuff is out of the realm at the moment. glad to hear that tilling isn't necessarily all bad; tilling = bad is what got me on the cardboard thing in the first place.
i do appreciate the heads-up!
basically we googled lasagna gardening/lasagna compost, and did some research on the soil in our area. once we got our head around the basics we just started using what we had on-hand.
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.
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
I ride an Easy Motion Evo Eco bought secondhand from a bike swap. i call her Thora, that's her if this picture loads correctly. i mostly use it for my tiny commute of 3 miles round trip in rural western Colorado.
To answer my own question, I'm working on restoring/modifying two mountain bikes I recently got for free from a coworker. I'm hoping to turn one into a sweet daily commuter for me!
I'm also a Buddhist and host weekly zazen at my house every Sunday morning. I feel like Zen/Buddhism and solarpunk go hand-in-hand - seeing the reality of interdepence, we can't keep killing the earth!
Finally, I'm also trying to get started composting again. I did really well last winter then got out of the habit when it got warmer (I have a thing about smells). I am hoping to get back into it now that it's cooler and maybe I can pay less attention to the smells for a bit.