Yeah I don’t think they’re talking about you

It depends on what you need to enjoy the space.

If you’re looking for a grass alternative and aren’t running around on it all the time, roman chamomile can be a good, low-growing, pet-safe plant. We used this on my neighbor’s postage stamp front lawn so he wouldn’t have to mow but it would still look nice and intentional. There are also a handful of other low-growing plants which require much less maintenance and are more drought-tolerant than grass, but they tend to be best for low-traffic areas, so if you’re out there playing catch or capture the flag with your kids most days they’re probably not as good as grass.

If you’re in a shady area, moss might be an option. It also prefers low traffic.

And the option abhored by HOAs and your fussiest neighbors: just don’t bother maintaining a perfect lawn. A lot of the work and environmental damage comes from keeping a perfect monocrop of a specific grass cultivar. Fertilizer to keep the soil good enough (which gets washed into local waterways and causes algae blooms) pesticides (which kill bees and a slew of other insects) and herbicides to kill any plants that try to compete with the grass (which remain in the soil as well). Traps for rodents that try to exist in the yard. Not to mention the energy and person-hours spent on trimming it frequently. Just accepting that grass isn’t really meant to form a thick lawn in most areas, and will look a bit patchy, multi-hued, and feature some other plants, will greatly reduce the effort and damage caused.

Or if you can’t stand the thought of doing that (or will get in trouble) consider downsizing it a little - section off the least-used sections of your lawn, plant some cool native trees or shrubs, throw down some mulch so it looks intentional.

And the last option (where applicable): no grass.

When I was a kid our house was in the woods, with no clearing to speak of, so we mostly just played on the forest floor, which was mostly leaves and pine needles. If you pick up the sticks and keep it somewhat open, it can look really beautiful.

I’ve seen similar, I’d never had trouble just running the drill till the sides were smooth before, but some of these sticks were still pretty live, and no matter how long I let the drill cut into the sides, or what speed I used, it still produced fluffy sawdust and left those splinters along the inside of some. I’d been planning to wait a year on those and drill them again but it took more sticks than I’d planned to fill it. For what it’s worth, they’re pretty soft, but they might harden as they dry? If it’s a legit risk for the bees I’ll definitely pull those tubes. I think cardboard tubes are probably the better way long term, certainly they’re less work which would make replacing them easier. I just prefer to make things myself when I can.

So far, we haven’t noticed any issues with birds or other critters. If we do, I’ll add a screen, but I didn’t want to risk making things easier for spiders, or helping water splash the holes if I didn’t have to.

We did have carpenter ants climb up behind the sticks so I need to figure out our solution to that. I’m really hoping thats new and that they didn’t get into the bee holes or take any eggs. The tree seems healthy so I’m thinking the bee house was what appealed to them?

I’ll update if I learn anything else.

To be honest, I don’t think I plan to do anything else with this project, but I still have the libreoffice document with selectable text and I’m happy to share it if you or anyone wants to use it to make something new.

https://mega.nz/file/edcmEAbA#EPFIg2YGU0e9L_SjVp6UT-Q6dMbmBLVDCdVab_-IrUE

Whoops, this should be higher rez, didn’t realize movim was compressing it

https://mega.nz/file/mR8iGbII#fVw3lCzdpxsyp60cOl50-HO93sYHpZm-Y125XnnPXn0

And the pdf version is available here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/spice_list_printable.pdf

Sorry about that, does this work better?

https://uploads.slrpnk.net/upload/099ea969b8b11f8f01bf401d7fc15101f571f842/w47MjvoKn26i2DzJZMrAUsffGKv6pcntQ1vIcvhO/EWdFU9F.jpg

https://movim.slrpnk.net/blog/jacobcoffinwrites%40slrpnk.net/i-made-a-chart-of-spices-and-their-substitutions-qwiYaU

I’m so glad! If I find another train scene to do I’ll I’ll be sure to share it here

Depends on your goals and resources. With a wood-burning train, you’ve got to source wood for the entire service life of the thing. So you have crews finding and cutting and splitting and moving wood (realistically that’s a separate business you’re paying). With this you source the soda, and hire the crews to dry it. But the soda is an upfront cost then you just reuse it, similar to the stations, which will take some maintenance but are simple to build so simple to fix.

If your goals include not causing deforestation, erosion, etc, this might be a good fit.

Edit: also these were described as being nearly silent, being simpler to operate, requiring fewer crew, and they don’t produce clouds of smoke.

There, finally finished the thing. https://slrpnk.net/post/4039949

These greenhouse designs make so much sense to me - the first time I saw this I was amazed I’d never considered how poorly standard greenhouses fit our use case up here. I worked on a farm for years growing up and we heated about half of them at least through December. Single or double ply plastic sheets and corrugated white plastic siding nailed to stick frame walls on the ends. Garage doors only on either end. I can’t imagine how much that cost to heat.

It’s that one-size-fits-all-just-burn-more-gas approach.

I’m actually just finishing up a winter scene featuring two of these, set into a south-facing hillside.

This is all awesome information, thank you for diving in! I’ve definitely got some more reading to do!

And it’s definitely worldbuilding - hopefully folks don’t mind me posting questions around the instance almost weekly, but it’s been really helpful for figuring out scenes before I draw them, and for building this setting in my head. I’m hoping to dive in on short fiction again soon. Plus when I see the same questions over on the subreddit I can link them to everyone’s answers. I’m hoping this will kind of build a resource for writers planning their solarpunk settings.

Yeah, it sounds like I can make a pretty good case for it if I do do a scene of a silo surrounded by grain. Intercropping and crop rotation and their role in resiliency are worth discussing.

I’d never heard about perennial grains and now I have some stuff to read up on! Thank you very much!

Thanks! This is really good information! Grain also seems to play a role in mitigating famines by serving as a sort of strategic food reserve - so it seems like even a solarpunk society with a focus on local agriculture and balancing their production to limit waste may want the means/surplus to provide for their global neighbors in hard times.

I had no idea about silage silos, which yeah, probably are most of what I see around here. Would grain silos be more centralized?

This is awesome! Thank you so much for putting it together!

Just watched it, thanks!

That’s a really cool way to do things! The pollarded trees are very distinctive and should show up well even at a distance. and I like how self-contained this layout seems to be. I’ll have to build the fields out of individual bits and pieces since I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to find aerial photos of a suitable field at the right angle, but it’ll give me a chance to make sure I have the details right.

I’ve started reading up on agroforestry and on Nitrogen-fixing Trees (the far-superior NFTs) and definitely plan to try and make this work. Do you have any recommendations on field size, layout (it sounds like alley-cropping is probably the most common fit in use in the US, but I’m happy to explore other options - some places seem to do straight rows, some do squiggly, irregular ones and I’m not sure why yet. I’m not sure yet what makes the best sense and what will be the most clear visually at this distance) or crops? It’s tough because I want to make sure it’s somewhat realistic for agroforestry but I also want to make sure I’m providing enough food and variety for the village to be somewhat self-sufficient, though there’s a train and this is all going to be pretty tiny anyways so I suppose it’s not a huge deal. I’m also looking at including some kind of algae farming and greenhouses, if there’s any way that could be copacetic with agroforestry I’d be happy to mix them up.

At the moment, my plans go about this far:

I figure the village will probably have some fruit trees inside it, along with taller trees for shade. I might move the river south to show they’re in a pretty dry spot. I can adjust the topology pretty easily but I’d like to have at least some of the chinese-style greenhouses provoq mentioned set on (or into, for bonus temperature regulation) a hill. Outside of that, I can do whatever makes sense. lots of squiggly rows of trees and crops or tiny herd animals between them? straight rows? I’m not sure how organized the fields should look but my instinct is to make some obvious property boundaries and make it look like several different farms occupying the land. not sure how solarpunk that is

Thanks again for the suggestions!

Thanks! I really appreciate it!

I never thought about it, but yeah, turns out greenhouses as I know them are a really good example of the one-size-fits-all approach to building enabled by the wealth of cheap energy we’re currently enjoying. I never really thought about how inefficient the ones I worked in were, especially in the winter. I really love these new designs. I was half expecting to find that they were dug into the ground to help regulate the temp, but it seems like the height is important to getting enough sunlight. They did say it helped to add earth berming on the west, north, and east walls, and that the fellow building one in Siberia had buried bart of it and used earth berming anywhere above ground. It’d be an interesting fit for a south-facing hill where they could get the best of both worlds

Interesting! Tilling was one of those defaults I hadn’t thought to question. That would look very different from a distance