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!
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.
it's been pretty decent here, though breathtakingly hot in the western Colorado high desert. i've been forced to confront my own laziness, though, which is less fun! my wife and i bought a house last year and i have all of these amazing, awesome, but also labor-intensive ideas about how to green it and solarpunk it up, and several of these ideas have just fizzled.
that said, i have at least installed gutters and rain barrels to irrigate our garden(s), which is good... i just haven't actually made a garden yet. oops! we do have two pounds of native cover crop seeds that we're going to sow at the beginning of September to start healing our rough, uncared-for dirt yard.
i've found a lot of joy in setting up bird feeders, too - we have seven now, all sourced locally via Buy Nothing or my mom's cast-offs. there were almost no birds here in September last year, and now we have an absolute ton. our elderly neighbors across the street also have a lot of feeders, so we will be keeping the birds happy through the winter too.
i started commuting by ebike in April and have really enjoyed that. i don't know how much of an impact that really makes but it feels good, so i'll take it.
finally, my wife and i were able to take a vacation to Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada. it's relatively near to us and is also one of the least-visited national parks not in Alaska. we got to hike to groves of 3000+ year-old Bristlecone pines and past that to a snowfield below a glacier. experiencing a snowfield in Nevada in August was not something i expected!
thanks for asking. hope the fall treats us well, collectively, and may we all grow towards liberation.
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.
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 ride an Easy Motion Evo Eco bought secondhand from a bike swap. i call her Thora, that's her if this picture loads correctly. i mostly use it for my tiny commute of 3 miles round trip in rural western Colorado.
hell yeah!