Thanks for writing this out, I found it very informative - even if I wouldn’t use them

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.

Thanks, I’d missed that one somehow - just signed up! https://pixelfed.social/i/web/post/607237425340447357

I’ve tried posting the image as a response to this comment (I’m guessing you don’t want to turn off noscript or whichever adblocker you’re running) but it won’t upload, possibly because this thread is on lemmy.ml? The good news is I’ve also uploaded it to a few other places:

• https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2023/09/11/repurposed-parking-garage-photobash/

• https://www.artstation.com/artwork/w05GWO

• https://writing.exchange/@jacobcoffin/111048596538451682

Hopefully one of those will work. If you know of a more fediverse-friendly image hosting solution I should be using, let me know!

I’ll look them up now! Thanks for the tip

Thanks! I think there’s a wonderful opportunity in this kind of art to demonstrate alternatives! I’m planning one involving a city street next, and I’m happy to try to incorporate any ideas into what I’m planning. Hopefully it’ll include a parking garage that’s been filled in (kind of ad-hoc and colorfully) with living space, and a street that’s been replaced with a bike path and forest, with market stalls in the spaces between the trees. I’ll try to hint at a farm or park on the roof of the garage if possible.

This is a long shot, but I made friends with my neighbor, who owned a house with a yard, and he was very much in favor of turning the (mostly dirt) lawn into a garden. We’ve acquired a lot of soil and cinderblocks on our local Everything is Free page, which we plan to use for a terraced little garden of native flowering plants. We got a bit delayed by life stuff and because I was waiting to see if someone would offer up a pile of pavers (as soon as I buy some I just know someone will) but we’ll get back to it soon. We’ve got a peach tree to plant and I’m researching to see if I can find a used solar panel somewhere to drive a small water feature.

This - once we’ve got small, dense power storage we can do all the cool scifi stuff: man-portable lasers/coilguns, strong augmentics with long battery life, chainswords, autonomous robots that operate for long spans of time.

I saw something once that said when you’re writing scifi to pick one technology to improve/add, and have all the changes in the setting flow from that. I almost always pick batteries.

In a cyberpunk setting, I feel like the new tech should be stuff that demonstrates the wealth disparity, being used everywhere, wastefully in rich people’s domain, while regular people are dependant on clunky, heavy, maybe unsafe older stuff. Batteries could be a good one for that, easy to build a plot around people stealing the new batteries from advertising drones or electric scooters from uplevel and selling them to shops that retrofit them into augmentic limbs or robots who otherwise need to recharge every couple hours.

Thanks! Yeah I don’t remember why I didn’t do headers, it definitely wouldn’t hurt

You’re right - I had to set the tab to ‘desktop site’ to get it to work (I have to do that to get imgur to work half the time so I already had it set that way).

Thanks! Thats high praise indeed!

Have you tried ‘open image in new tab’?

Thanks!!

Thanks, I’d thought about it but I don’t mind it getting shared or attribution getting lost - I pulled it together from stuff I found online after all. I don’t think I’ll care if I see someone taking credit for making it but I don’t know for sure since it hasn’t happened yet. But I’m trying to get good at just giving stuff away - and if people want to take it and mutate it further, that’s the natural progression of things.

I’d rather nobody sells it, but I don’t think I can make it freely available and keep that from happening.

If you’d like a printable version, I uploaded it here: https://jacobcoffinwrites.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/spice_list_printable.pdf

Yeah there are a bunch of species of solitary bees that nest in holes they find or make - this was partly an attempt to protect carpenter bees from trying to nest in my parents’ house, in addition to providing shelter for pollinators

I’ll have to check, I know I used a range of sizes on the basic set I have, I think whatever guide I was following recommended a few