Solarpunk

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 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.

Big one right now for me is regenerative gardening. Ive gardened for years and have always practiced some of the permaculture principles, but this is the first year Im gardening with the explicit goal of regenerative gardening.

Learning to make, repair and upcycle my own clothes instead of relying of badly made polyester fast fashion that doesn't fit well. Also getting my fitness up so I can bike instead of drive which is difficult because I live in an absurdly hilly area.

I'm actually working on myself. Actively getting fit, building strength to hike and spend more time in nature without pain. Changing my social media habits so I can focus on useful communities instead of mindless scrolling through eternal doom... Planning what to plant in my backyard next

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.

Mending clothes and a tiny bit of guerilla gardening. I'm looking into tablet weaving atm

Today I'm building a bat house and fixing up two laptops to give away. Both of these are zerowaste projects (the bat house is all second-hand lumber, and the laptops are ewaste that will find good use with a refugee resettlement program). On the back burner I have a desk I'm restoring also to give away - I find stuff on trash day, fix it up, and put it up on our local Buy Nothing group. If possible, I try to give the person receiving it the choice on color of stain etc.

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.

Researching plant genomes! Honestly, it's a lot of fun.

We’re on vacation and it’s 100% public transportation from beginning to end, the kids are doing pretty good with schlepping their bags on and off trains.

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

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!

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).

With limited space I am growing some plants on my balcony. Decided to harvest and dry the herbs so I have supply during the winter. I want to make my own herb tea blend as well, let's see how that goes. Also decided to get of the streaming sites and have my own server at home. I calculated the energy price and it will be cheaper for me. This at least saves energy during streaming because traffic doesn't go through 10 routers on the way to my device. And I am on a renewable energy plan.

A tractor, from waste and winches.

I'm currently struggling to keep my first non-apartment vegetable garden and first cannabis plant alive through a long heatwave. There's at least a few fruits and veg on most of the plants but none are really thriving. I got a really late start getting them in the ground in mid May unfortunately. Pretty sure I was drastically under-watering too after recently acquiring one of those electronic soil meters to check.

I'm also working on designing and 3d printing some QoL mods for my e-bike and my partner's e-scooter since those are our primary means of transportation.

Securing technical liberation and building a path for us as a community to understand and control the very technology we depend upon.

A concentrated solar reactor for powering high temperature processes (>2,000 C) for industrial decarbonization and more efficient Gen3 concentrated solar power plants that incorporate solid particles as the solar receiver.

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.