do you have a good mujadara recipe that you like? i've made it before but it was incredibly bland despite caramelizing the onions for what felt like 100 years.
ooh, excellent ideas, thank you!
dang, approximately where in GJ? that's where i'm located and i'd love to get some inspiration. i see some stuff like that in Fruita sometimes.
100%
oh dang, shutters! i forgot they're not just decorative.
i might do something similar when we eventually replace everything in our house with electric stuff, but for now we have a gas-powered water heater. i am saving for a full solar installation on our roof, though, which would power everything. solar is the one energy-producer we have here in absolutely wild abundance.
that's where i saw that video! appreciated.
i'd love to move, but i want to improve where i am while i'm here. we have some plans for trees and sunflowers or amaranth on that side, but i think it's a "both/and" situation rather than an "either/or" for me.
yes, that actually is my very long term strategy, but the trees are not in place yet. my wife and i had a permaculture analyst suggest plants that produce edible foods for our area, so there are some plans for that and maybe also sunflowers or amaranth to do a natural block. but for today, i'm thinking awnings.
yeah, i'm thinking (tentatively) about trying to get some non-plastic, manually retractable cloth ones. then i can leave them fully extended for the hot-as-balls summer and dial them back for other seasons.
i wanted awning before that video, but that video made me start pricing out my options! ha.
well, my plan was to fix up a free entry-level mountain bike a coworker gave me - and, to be clear, i still intend to do it. however! i ran out of time, money, and know-how, all relatively quickly. and combined with that, i also decided somewhat last minute that i don't really want to drive to work any more in 2024 if i can possibly help it.
so instead i dusted off my electric chariot, my Shadowfax, my E-Motion ebike which i have named "Thora". she's my go-to ride in nice weather, but has been packed up for the winter. last night i got her out of her "garage" and charged her up, and this morning i did my quite short 1.5 mile commute in cold weather for the first time. 21 degrees F, -6 degrees C.
just wanted to say, i super appreciate all the advice shared in my other thread about winter biking. i wore my snowshoeing coat, gloves and glove liners, and a stocking cap. it worked! the only rough part was my face; it got so cold i got a headache. that said, i can just try a scarf tomorrow.
here's to functional transportation, even in the wintertime.
hi all - i am wondering what your daily riders look like - for example above i have my ebike (a secondhand Eco-Evo by Easy Motion), which is my summer daily driver since i can charge it with solar energy and don't get as hot cycling (i'm fat and i live in a desert, which is a miserable combo sometimes).
right now i'm working on putting together a winter "acoustic" bike by putting together a bunch of parts stripped from old bikes i've salvaged or been given, but i'd love to see any ideas for what folks ride.
crossposted from Reddit:
hi all - my wife and I are doing our best to amend our terrible soil in climate zone 6b/7a (western Colorado, near the Utah border). our logic and philosophy is that at this time we can only do what we can do, so that's making our home as solarpunk and permaculture-centric as possible right now (without losing sight of building collective resilience and empowering the disenfranchised).
to that end, our soil: it's pretty abiotic. to grow food, which is a future goal, we need healthier soil. also we're not flat broke but we're relatively close; being frugal and cheap is a necessity. so we determined that we're going to try to amend our soil using cheap, locally sourced, and recycled things - and maybe more sweat equity than I'd love, ha! we elected to go with the lasagna method.
the lasagna method is to lay down different strata of materials to encourage the breakdown of "brown" and "green" materials, in composting terms. also our yard currently is mostly dirt with a few weeds for good measure, so even if we eff it up, it'll be okay.
I work in IT and my wife's a librarian, so we have access to a LOT of cardboard. I've been collecting it slowly over the summer, and today we decided to lay down our first layer.
here's the plan: lay down a layer of cardboard (brown only, tape and labels as removed as possible) two sheets thick. soak the cardboard so it doesn't blow away in the wind. cover that with a layer of wood chips, which we happen to have from removing a tree along our fence line with our neighbors and chipping it up. the wood chip layer is about two to three inches thick, and then we soak that, too. finally, we cover the wood chips with a layer of greens; for us, this is getting on our local Buy Nothing group and asking for lawn clippings. we are also going to plant fall cover crops and once they have grown in the spring, do a chop-and-drop layer of that.
over time, we will plant a few trees (looking at either a local growers apple variety or a multi-graft we can buy online) and have a rotating group of garden beds.
so that's our plan: a bit of couples labor each weekend over a long period of time, with the hopeful result of improved soil biology and then the growing of native.plants and flowers and food crops.
I hope this is solarpunk enough to warrant this post!
good growing to us all.
thank you! my wife and i take turns cooking and it's my night tonight, i think i will give this a shot!