#solarpunk action

Hello SolarPunks, for a university project I'm working together with a government agency to build a new forest next to, and integrated into, a new city that's being built (I legally can't say where, but somewhere in the Netherlands). The site was previously farm land and production forest.

The goal is to have this new city live in synergy with nature. I'm planning on making this place as biodiverse as possible with relief and natural ponds using indigenous plants to promote insects and amphibians. There's plenty of trees for birds and bats. Wood piles for other critters and fungi to find shelter and food.

To integrate humans into this environment I was thinking about making a food forest where all the plant layers have some edible or medicinal indigenous plants with fruit/nut trees. Decking boards and stepping stones in ponds and marshy areas. As a community space I like the idea of a willow gazebo and a natural playground.

I'd like to keep some pieces of land restricted from humans by placing "fencing" made up of dead trees and branches and blackberry bushes so birds and other critters have some undisturbed nesting places.

Don't know if I already talked about this here. But even though is a Sunday and I come back very tired of this work, at the same time it really give energy back to me to keep doing the work that needs to be done now to make things better someway.

Okay I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on guerrilla gardening or anything. I'm still a novice at best, a shy little baby who feels awkward scattering seeds when even one other person is on the sidewalk with me. So lets consider this a starting guide, for people like me who haven't done it much before and want to try for the best results quickly.

So, first things first, let's talk about your seeds. Gardeners have got to consider what plants they're growing in their environment, but especially guerrilla gardeners. If someone plants an invasive plant in their backyard, they can attempt to wrangle it or at least contain it to only their backyard. Guerrilla gardeners are gardening out in the open, where things can probably spread even more easily and cause even more problems. Keep in mind that not all nonnative plants are invasive, but also keep in mind that a native plant will be better for your projects/environment than a nonnative one. That being said, if you wanna grow a nonnative noninvasive plant in your guerrilla garden, I'm not going to be the one to stop you, but maybe give it some native friends. They'll be more acclimated to your environment anyhow.

Next, let's consider location! If you're going to be guerrilla gardening, where you do it is of great importance, and may even impact your seed selection. Empty lots, grass along sidewalks, empty tree pits are all popular from what I've seen online. Roadsides can also be an option, as long as you stay safe. Consider how much sun your location gets, does it tend to puddle up with water when it rains, or does it stay dry a lot? Is the soil good, or is it dry and not very fertile? Are there weeds growing, or is it entirely barren? Do you need to clean up some trash before you start planting? Does it get mowed often, by private owners or the city?

Also while you're picking your locations, consider how often you can/would go back to that location, as it might impact how you choose to disperse your seeds. If you can visit it often to weed and amend the soil and whatnot, you can do your gardening differently from someone who can't return often or add to the soil. Also consider that, if you're planning to grow edible plants, you may want to get the soil tested first--as well as avoid planting super close to roadways. Not to say planting near roads is impossible or a 100% bad idea, but consider how such close proximity to cars and all their exhaust and other such things may affect your plants.

Consider the timing. Plants are going to need water to grow, whether you choose to use seeds or transplant seedlings. Take a look at the weather for the next week or so! If it's going to be rainy, you probably won't have to drop by to water it super often--if it's going to be hot and sunny, you might want to go back once every few days at least. Consider what month it is--is it even the right time to be planting the seeds you're planning to plant? Is it too hot, too cold?

At this point you might choose to reconsider what seeds/plants you decide to use for your project, which is 100% fine. Now you also need to consider how you're going to plant them. Depending on how easy the place is to access, you might be able to just plain scatter the seeds--I've just grabbed some from my bag and scattered them with my hands, but I've seen people use salt shakers and even salt guns for this same purpose. (While I'm sharing their links, the tiktok account SFinbloom is pretty rad. bee outfits optional btw) If you want to toss seeds out further, or make sure they don't get eaten by birds, options like seed bombs and seed paper/seed confetti are always good options! Though, I do recommend making these yourself, or at least making sure the seeds in any purchased ones are native to your area/noninvasive. If you don't want to plant seeds, you can always start seeds at your home, or buy seedlings/plants to then transplant in your desired location--this'll likely get you a quicker result!

If you want to cover a lot of ground, or make it more fun, consider recruiting friends! Or maybe meet people on social media and join up to guerrilla garden together! It could be a fun time, and you could make a day of it--grab lunch together while you're out or something. If you want, you could even get reflective vests for yourself/everyone, so it looks like you're working for a volunteer group/the city. It may keep people from asking questions!

About that, also consider that guerrilla gardening is a revolutionary act, and as such, some people may be more opposed to it than others. People may come bug you, and depending on the person, may even try escalating things further. Sprinkling seeds or using seed bombs is less likely to draw attention, but keep this in mind as you go out there.

Once the deed is done, the deed is done! Wait for the rains, or return to your spot and water things yourself! You can do guerrilla gardening in an anonymous sneaky fashion, you can share your progress online, or you can even be loud and proud about it everywhere! That's all up to you, this is just some basic advice I've garnered from online posts.

Feel free to add your own advice as well! And if I said anything incorrect, please let me know!

[photo id: a yellow colander with a mix of black raspberries, red raspberries, and blueberries.]

[photo id: a round outdoor table covered in garlic plants, freshly pulled with dirt still clinging to the bulbs.]

[photo id: a towel laid flat on a black cooktop, with rosemary branches heaped on it.]

What have you all been up to recently? What solarpunk projects have you been working on? Please share!

Unfortunately, where I live we’re still vacillating quickly back and forth between lightly snowing and sunny, so actual planting isn’t gonna happen for another little while BUT I’ve been meaning to do some more prep.

- research raspberry plant maintenance. I’ve heard some vague things about how you have to trim them, but I need to start figuring out specifics, because I’m worried ours might die if I don’t. This winter was weirdly both harsh and not harsh at all, and unlike many of our other plants, I haven’t seen any shift from the raspberries since winter so I’m a bit worried.

- Find a way to measure the amount of sun that different spots of the garden get over the course of a day. This will help with planning out the best place for each plant, because we’re not always the best at picking spots for them based on their needs. Some numbers or perhaps “sunlight ratings” could help us plan in a more analytical way, rather than a gut-feeling kinda way.

- Look up and hopefully buy this cool book I heard about on patchwork repair and how to make it really cute and fun. It’s called Joyful Mending by Noriko Misumi.

- Repair the button on a fast-drying hair-towel I have. The button’s been falling off from like maybe day 3 of owning it, but it’s generally held on well enough. I’ve been meaning to fix it for a while though so I’m using this week as an excuse to get it done.

- There was something else I needed to repair by way of sewing that I can’t remember what it was so I’m gonna look for that.

- depending on the weather, I’m gonna try and go pick up some trash in my area. My city was once held a label “prettiest city in-“ (I don’t remember the range) because the snow covers up the trash and kind of collects it over time, so when the plows come around they push it all to the shoulder of the road, and into big central piles in the parking lots. That means when the street-sweepers come around in spring, not only do they pick up all the gravel that they put in the roads for traction in winter, they also pick up a lot of the trash. However, that doesn’t get the more natural spaces, or the out-of-the-way spots, and with the pandemic increasing the usage of single-use-items, there’s more than usual to be found and cleaned up.

Refuse Dystopia vol.01

Refuse Dystopia is a SolarPunk zine created to inform and inspire its readers into living more sustainably and harbor hope for the future. This volume focuses on the basics of SolarPunk, self-help guides, and has interviews with people who've done work to make their work environment more sustainable. A more extensive list of resources can be found here, created by @justalittlesolarpunk.

The next volume will focus on space travel and how new (space) technology can offer a solution for sustainability issues here on Earth.

A guide for the hopeful.

🌞🌻🌞🌍🌏🌎🌞🌻🌞🌍🌏🌎🌞🌻🌞🌍🌏🌎🌞🌻🌞

Step 1:

Build your idea, and get creative. What type of people exist in your workplace? What would lift their spirits? What would be useful? For what do you have space? Are there areas of improvement?

💡: Community garden, give and take cabinet, library, space for art, one man's trash is another man's treasure-bin (for single use items turned reusable i.a. lab equipment or other disposable items), figure out how to lessen energy consumption, ask to adjust the cafeteria food into having plant-based options, or completely plant-based, organize events, etc.

Step 2:

Work out the logistics of your plan. Who do you need to ask permission for? Talk to your coworkers, do they agree with your idea? Do your coworkers want to help you, or add onto your idea? How long will this idea take? Make a plan of action. Figure out if you can add your idea into your work schedule or if it's a volunteer project. If there is no space in your company's building, is there a way you can organize something in a public place or at your own residence?

Step 3:

Create! Make flyers or stickers telling your company and coworkers about your fun new project. Make people enthusiastic. Let people know that anyone can make anything possible as long as they set their mind to it.

And remember:

When you want to change the world, you don't ask for permission.

Alright friends so I was shopping at Target with a friend and I went to check out their Spring/Outdoors section because of course I did and I saw an assortment of 'seed ball' gardening kits. See below.

Now, this caught my eye for several reasons. For one, I'd been thinking about making seed bombs (another term for seed balls) for awhile now, but hadn't figured out where exactly to get the clay from. I've also already started thinking about what I wanted to grow in my garden, as well as what I wanted to put in my hypothetical seed bombs. Not to mention, they're bright and colorful.

Perhaps I'm reading into it too far. But the origin of guerrilla gardening is gardeners planting things--food, flowers, etc--on land that they don't have the legal rights to. It's been a form of direct action and protest from the beginning, and not necessarily one that always has positive connotations either, depending on who you ask.

Granted, in recent years, it's gotten a lot of positive press--I'd heard of the idea of guerrilla gardening in this time, where lovely positive articles were being written, morning news shows were doing quirky little shorts showing off seed bombs as a cute fun activity with your kids in the backyard, and guerrilla gardeners were getting TedTalks. Hell, the first time I'd heard of a 'seed bomb' was volunteering at the zoo as a teenager and making and selling them for a dollar donation to help save tigers. It was literally the whole thing that made me want to garden in the first place! Is the positive PR a bad thing? Not in my opinion, no. Sharing positive radical ideas and concepts, drawing attention to the lack of green spaces and food access in communities, and boosting the amount of habitat for pollinators are all fantastic things! But at the same time, I don't know how to feel about these kits. It sort of feels like commodifying and capitalizing a revolutionary act, sort of 'sanitizing' it to be more PR friendly? Again, I could be overreacting.

The entire air these kits had to me was sort of a 'hey, make seed bombs, toss them in your backyard! How fun!' Am I going to demand that the company making these puts an entire history lesson on the back of every package, mentioning the origins of seed bombs and their revolutionary nature? Not necessarily, but still.

Obviously, this seed bomb kit could be the thing that gets someone into gardening, which is always a plus in my book. Maybe people will use the seed bombs for their intended purpose, and throw them into empty lots and neglected spaces to create some color in their worlds (though, at that note, I'm not sure how excited to be about people throwing tomato seeds into lots where they may pick up toxins from the ground that people may try to eat later). But still, in the moment, I was getting a very heavy 'oh hey we're sanitizing your movement' sort of vibe.

History of guerrilla gardening aside, as a pollinator gardener, I wanna talk about the stuff included in the wildflower kit.

The front of the box has cute pictures of hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies, hanging out around drawn and labeled flowers; dwarf snapdragons, plains coreopsis, sweet william pinks, dwarf cosmos, coneflower, and milkweed (if you know me you know I love milkweed). The back lists all the flowers included in each 'set' of seeds. But you've gotta wonder... are these native? And to where? It says it was made in the USA, but the USA is pretty big, with a wide variety of different pollinators and pollinator plants in each region. Something native to one area can be invasive in another, which is never really good. The company making these kits, Modern Sprout, is based in Chicago, Illinois. They have a lot of other products on their website, many of which are all very cute, but. There are over 100 species of milkweed native to the United States, and they don't all grow well in the same places or are even native to the same places. The back of this kit only says 'Milkweed.' Thank you. Which one is it? Am I going to plant swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) in an area better suited for common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)? Am I going to be planting the mildly-controversial tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) all over my neighborhood? This doesn't even begin to address the other plants in this kit, which I recognized the names of but not enough to know intimately if they're native to my area. The idea of someone intending to do good but accidentally spreading an invasive species around is scary because it's possible.