What Are You Working On?

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.

This is awesome. Are we best friends now? I have a background in plant tissue culture, especially micropropagation of woody species. I don't do that professionally anymore, mostly because I have other skills that the job market likes better. However, I always have a propagation experiment of some kind going.

I think you are doing great work and your vision is very clear-eyed. Even from a grubby capitalist perspective, tree nurseries are a good future-proof business because climate changes are going to necessitate a lot of re-planting. It's that kind of local knowledge you are making that if more widespread will help us develop the resilience to maybe, just maybe, get through the next couple of centuries.
This is so interesting! When I was growing up we had a small orchard in our backyard with a wide variety of apples, plums, pears, etc. We used to do something similar and give out cuttings to anyone who asked so there's clones of those trees all over the area as far as 3-ish hours away that I know of. When us kids grew up my parents sold the house but my Dad took cuttings from all the different apple trees and spliced them onto a root stock at the new house to make hybrids with all the varieties from our old house. Unfortunately my parents both passed and before my partner and I were able to move back to the family home someone who was helping us out with the yard work ran over the hybrid-apple tree with the riding lawn mower 😑 so its no longer with us either.
- Very cool story but sad ending. I’ve seen many a tree lost to lawn mowers unfortunately. Maybe you could try reaching out to some of those people who your dad gifted trees to and see if you could bring them back?

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'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!

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.

Same for mending and sewing clothing. Except I've run aground a bit on my own perfectionism. I've somehow talked myself into making a pattern block for my butt so I can make the most optimal pants and shorts, but making a block is an Ordeal with Math involved and I haven't had the bandwidth to accomplish it yet.
- I've been working on a bodice block, I know your pain.
Love this. I have been thinking on it myself just how rubbish most of the clothes I buy are, not to mention concerns about exploitation of the people making them.
- Is there a clothes making community here on SLRPNK? I've started to return to clothes making recently (knitting, sewing, dyeing) and would love to learn more. I'm spectacularly bad at it and it's so much fun.

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

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

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.

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).

solar panel connected to Jackery generator charging an ebike.

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.

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

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.

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.

Question for ya: I grabbed the Buy Nothing app to check it out.... and it immediately asked me to subscribe? And it won't let you use features until you do? This seems like the opposite of a good platform. Is it worth using anyway?
- To be honest, I've only ever used Buy Nothing and Everything is Free groups on facebook (my only use of the place now) so I can't vouch for the app. I don't like specialized apps and giving away information, so that wouldn't appeal to me either. In the last couple years I've been way more active on my local Everything is Free page but which is the nicer community (or whether an EIF page exists) is going to be very dependent on your location. All I can say is to check them (both) out and see if they're any good!
  
  I really hope you have a good experience with it, I'm a huge advocate for these groups and am always happy to talk about them! And feel free to stop by https://slrpnk.net/c/zerowaste if you're looking for similar stuff.