solar-sunnyside-up

[solar-sunnyside-up]

So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.

So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).

However

After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.

Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.

So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.

I love a couple of things about this story:

Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood

As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building

BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM

These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.

[solar-sunnyside-up]

a commissioned butter dish, and something I’ve never been asked for before as a subject; mosquitoes!

[solar-sunnyside-up]

do you ever just suddenly feel the weight of more years of exhaustion than you’ve been alive

[solar-sunnyside-up]

iKarly marx So wake up the workers of our nation

[solar-sunnyside-up]

Me reading dense political and philosophical papers in prep to have a coffee meeting to discuss it with a new group while listening to Kesha and Marina and the Diamonds: Wait maybe I am capable of Having Fun. I think this is what Fun is to me

[solar-sunnyside-up]

Puppies getting warm and toasty by the fire, ok?

[solar-sunnyside-up]

I don't want my cellphone to have AI I want it to have 3 days of battery time. I don't want my computer to have AI preinstalled I want it to have seven usb ports and high ram at affordable price. I don't want my games to have AI built levels I want them to be so optimized I could run them on a nokia.

[solar-sunnyside-up]

if i cant kill myself i guess i just have to make art and cook good meals and listen to music and dress up pretty and hope it will be all worth it to be doing something to distract myself forever

[solar-sunnyside-up]

[solar-sunnyside-up]

being a fucking casual is a skill that takes years of honing

[solar-sunnyside-up]

If anyone remembers the old story about how male prisoners were found to be calmed when their cells were painted pink; (oft cited to prove that the color pink has a calming effect on men) apparently this research was replicated with other paint colors and it was found that any color of paint has the same effect, including painting the walls the same color that they were before. As it turns out, you have to clean in order to paint, and people are happier when their environment has been recently cleaned. The obvious takeway is that correlation does not equal causation, but the even MORE obvious takeaway is the many times proved but seldom acknowledged law that one should never attempt to extrapolate general principles out of studies done in a prison

[solar-sunnyside-up]

Learning to knit turned out to be an early step in remembering my own small powers.

No good sweater options? I'll knit my own. Pants don't fit quite right? I'll alter them. Hole worn in my favorite pajamas? I'll patch it. Shoes don't match my clothes? I'll dye them. Cabinet not exactly what I hoped for? Paint.

As much as these are small things, I think it's genuinely transformative to take ownership of your space and your things in this way.

Maybe next I can work to transform my relationships, my gatherings, my communities.

[solar-sunnyside-up]

I made envelopes! Out of old calendars! I took a boring envelope apart and used it as stencil to cut them. Looking forward to sending snailmail to all of my friends :D

[solar-sunnyside-up]

i fixed my first wrist cruff that was literally falling apart because i refuse to throw it away 😇

i just dont know if i should put the studs back on or not 😭😭😭

heres how it was before

[solar-sunnyside-up]

I made a painting of a solarpunk facility! This is based on some sketches I made a few weeks ago.

[solar-sunnyside-up]

[solar-sunnyside-up]

Upcycled jewelry time ;) I had this leather zipper piece I harvested from an old purse and turned it into a spike bracelet 🌿⭐️

I used some large sew-on snaps as closures and i added some charms to the zipper. It was a fun project and it helped me out of my art block a little bit :)

[Image ID: an 8 inch long and 2 inch wide black leather bracelet with a black zipper in the middle. The two segments when unzipped are about half and inch wide and each segment has seven half inch cone spikes lining them about an inch apart fron each other. Both the leather segments have white stitching along all the edges from when this zipper piece was attached to a purse. There are large silver snaps on the ends of the bracelet with black embroidery thread attaching them, and on the loop that the leather zipper pull is attached to, there's a large safety pin with beads on it. two black wooden beads and a big green plastic star bead in between them.

End ID]