hamtron5000

hamtron5000, 6 months ago

from my wife and i: we relatively recently received some free bikes from a colleague of mine. i’m fixing one up myself to be an ultimate commuter, but my wife said she didn’t really want the other one - so we’re fixing it up to give to a fifteen year old we know who needs reliable in-town transportation. it should be done this week, and he’s getting it on Friday. i hope he likes it!

also, we’re decorating for the holidays but in a sustainable, old-fashioned kind of way. my wife is a really good fabric artist and has crocheted a long holly vine that wraps around our living room. it’s well off the ground, and so that’s where we hang our ornaments so our two energetic kitties don’t succumb to temptation and danger. we did hook up house lights this year, powered by rechargeable batteries that i recharge using our Jackery and a solar panel. it’s small things, but it’s a start.

i’ve mentioned it before but we’re still planning on our community building chili feast, we’ve just had to move it to January due to our schedules. and we still host weekly zazen (Zen Buddhist meditation) at our house. we have four folks outside our family who come almost every weekend, and last weekend we did our first all-day sit on Saturday, from 8am to 5pm. i just launched a website for our group, in the hopes that anyone in our rural western Colorado locale that searches for “meditation”, “Buddhism”, or “Zen” and our city name will find our site and, if they feel like it, join us.

hamtron5000, 7 months ago

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.

hamtron5000, 7 months ago

I wish I had a photo of my setup but I apparently never did that, how odd! Anyway, it’s a series of pallets tied together with zip ties to make bins. I keep a seal-able five gallon bucket with lid in the kitchen, and we toss any organic scraps in there. We don’t have much yard yet so there are few grass clippings, but we have added some from neighbors before. Plus woodchips, leaves, etc. The smell issue came from unloading the buckets weekly in the pile - I would gag from the smell, though it was pretty mild all things considered. The pile itself didn’t reek really, but the bucket did. I just need to clean it more but with my brain sometimes a tiny challenge becomes a Mighty Challenge and it’s easier just to stop.

hamtron5000, 7 months ago

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, 8 months 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!

hamtron5000, 9 months ago

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/64c4cbcf-665b-432f-9dfd-704aea6844b6.webp 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.

hamtron5000, 9 months ago

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.

hamtron5000, 9 months ago

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.

hamtron5000, 9 months ago

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!