This is a fantastic resource! Thank you!

we do sort of, we rake it up and

1. some of it goes to the local animal rescue centre, they have horses, goats, sheep etc. They also let us take as much of the manure as we want and we mix it into our composts

2. Feed the neighbours cows with wheelbarrows of apples

3. Some goes into the compost itself.

4. Share with local birds :)

I'd give it a shot if you can. You might find other things along the way.

I grew up on a farm surrounded by goji berries. My mom told me they were poison so I avoided them. 35/40 years later I found out they are amazingly tasty. Now I can recognize the plants even when they are not covered in fruit.

There are 2 jujubes listed near me, I really want to check them out.

It actually taught me to look for things I'd never considered before like paw paws and persimmons instead of just neglacted apple trees.

I'm noticing that now. Lots of trees produce fruit, but unless you know what it is, you tend to disregard it. My old neighborhood had a lot of feijoa being grown as an ornamental, and most people had no idea how good they were to eat. When they were in season I'd periodically just gather some, as they'd be all over the ground.

This is a neat map. I have a few spots that I forage goji berries, and currants. I worry about adding them to the map though and having the area damaged.

There are some crabapple trees around town that I will add though.

Same thing happened to me in missouri. It actually taught me to look for things I'd never considered before like paw paws and persimmons instead of just neglacted apple trees. Then once you learn to spot them once, you can keep finding them everywhere.

This is a really cool thing I've never heard of before. Thanks! I live in Southern California and have previously had my own sources of free fruit to gather, including citrus and feijoa, but have moved neighborhoods. I just used the map to find new potential sources in my neighborhood.

Not that reflective surfaces aren’t a valid technique for both macro and mirco climate engineering but this reads like an advertisement.

I've run these on full beds using sfg, one dripper per square. The larger model (c60) actually waters three separate 13mm dripper lines set up in rings around the base of 20year old apple treas

(Err, not sure that made sense: three trees, each has a large 13mm poly dripper ring around the base. The c60 feeds all three simultaneously. At my previous house it actually watered three seperate beds - two 2x3m , one 1x1m)

I have a C24 watering a 1x3m bed with a banana tree. You can get a lot of water out of those buggers and you can tweak higher flow dribblers and 4mm weepers

Those sorts of thing sound great for watering a few pots. Could probably work well for the rhubarb with a dripper somewhat near each plant and under the shade of its leaves, they they are large and spaced out. Attempting to grow some tree kale which could probably use it too. I presume you balance the drip rate to keep the area of soil moist but not soaked.

But I also have things growing that are spread out more like walking onions, garlic, jerusalem artichokes. There isn't really a clear point to water for these and they take up a fair sized area.

Check out irrigatias. I've been using them for some years to great effect. In Australia at the height of summer a 100l reservoir needs topping once a week, you can expect much less

Help out an untrained eye here: what am I looking at? What kind of tree and herbs are those? Is there a cooperative interaction between them?

If you need tips about living in a vehicle theres a YouTube called “cheap rv living” that helped me a ton. You can easily have a bed, solar power, fans, cooking, etc inside a vehicle, and the freedom that comes with it.

It’s good to be out enjoying nature, often does wonders for your psychological well being. As a very tech-centric person, I intentionally moved to a more rural area with excellent outdoor amenities to enable me to do so frequently. It helps, but doesn’t necessarily solve all problems in my case. More like a critical piece of the puzzle.

I’ve been researching and planning a “forever home” in this area with my partner for a few years now, so I can share some thoughts I have about this based on my read of your situation. As a caveat though, I haven’t done it yet - still planning.

Try not to underestimate how much work it will be. You will need the necessities, food and shelter as you pointed out, but also some form of income because it will cost some money to build out new things and do what you need to do (clothes, utilities for internet, electric and plumbing, equipment for farming food forest, fencing to manage wildlife and protect your crops, chicken coop, etc etc). Are you planning to build a shelter, or live out of a van? I assume the latter because of your use of the term “caravan,” but it isn’t quite clear. If you’re doing a van, realize that a decent one can be quite expensive. Like over $120k expensive. You can definitely get creative with stuff like a used U-Haul or something to save money, but if this is going to be your home for the foreseeable future, you need to be comfortable in it. There are a ton of great content creators on YouTube and whatnot with ideas here, so do your research to know what you’re getting into. For me a van won’t work because I can’t do cramped spaces for extended periods, but if you can the mobility benefits would be pretty awesome.

Speaking of - would you be comfortable living in such a cramped space? Usually you’ll have like a single cooktop and maybe 2-3’ of counter space for your “kitchen” in one of these setups. Would that be enough room to prepare all the wonderful food you want to grow in your food forest? People often do a sawdust bucket for a mobile bathroom solution in these vans. Is that something you’d be comfortable with until you can build an outhouse on your land?

It’s a deep topic, plenty more to consider but I think the above points are a good place to start. Tl;dr: really take the time to research and plan out what will work for you. Recognizing where you are now isn’t working is a great first step to build up motivation to act and change things, just make sure you look before you leap =]

Thanks! It's very slow going, I've been at it more lately because I've been snowed in and had nothing better to do, but it is a fun diversion. I appreciate the link, those look very much like what I had in mind. If I ever make anything worth a writeup I plan to post a description here so stay tuned. At the current rate of progress I'll probably have a working prototype in 5 - 15 years.

Interesting stuff - kinda jealous you have the time for such fun. Anyway, I think I answered your OP question with the eBay link. I've never built one myself - and I definitely can't point you to which are better - but at least you know they exist, and can hopefully find your way from there. Good luck!

I haven't taken this one apart, but it's too thin to accomodate 18650s. I think it's just a rectangular pack. I will probably take it apart just to see if I can salvage any of the components but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

My immediate concern is just charging my phone when I'm out and about, and for that I don't need passthrough or hotswapping or any of that stuff. If I have my Pi out in the field and I'm running a test, that's when I'd like things like passthrough or hotswapping so I can leave it out there for days at a time and not have to reboot it.

The hot swapping specifically is a long term ambition I have for some farm rovers. I want to do moisture sampling and maybe even some surveillance of weeds / insects with some cameras mounted to them, and then generate some reports based on the collected data. The idea is I'll have different units that do different things, and have different power requirements, but they all run on interchangeable cells that can be recycled through the same charger. It's extremely not necessary and it's definitely easier to just reboot the device once the new cells are installed, but I like the idea of keeping the on-unit compute active so I can see analytics from its perspective throughout the process. The Pi is overkill for what I'm doing, but those are the boards I have at the moment (those, and all my old android phones) so that's what I'm using to prototype. If I ever build something that I want to scale, that's when I'll start thinking about optimizing compute for the task I'm building for.

The pass through would be for something that doesn't offload the cells, but rather docks into a station kinda like a roomba does. I'd just hook the charger up to some contact plates and have it park on them (or set the rover in the dock myself), and the rover would be able to undock itself and get to work once it's charged. I'd still like those to use replaceable cells, just so I don't have to desolder anything when the cells start to fail. I'm planning to prototype both, which one ends up being easier depends a lot on what hardware I can buy vs. what I have to cobble together myself.

I've just had my first bank go puffy (RAV Power, I think?) not all that long ago, and it looked like there were 18650s used inside already. I just haven't gotten to trying to replace them yet, so I'm not sure. Have you looked inside yours? I don't see why you can't just exchange them if so. Might require a minor bit of de/soldering work.

I remember seeing charger bank shells on eBay.

Finally, I think a full blown RPi is serious overkill for your intended purpose. At least consider a Pico - much smaller, cheaper, and actually intended for simpler uses like this (although it's still kinda overkill).

I do find your hot-swap idea interesting, why would you need to do this if you had pass-through?

Thing is I know most of the local ones or can look them up easily enough, it's finding out which plants from other areas will also grow here that is difficult

I'm late to the post, but if you're still looking research local fruit bearing species.

Those tend to be at least shade tolerant

I'm thinking of hanging them indoors by a window, strung together with string, but resting on the window ledge so I can change out their water from time to time.

Seed-wise, I have no idea. My plan was to just scatter some old seeds I found, but I'm wondering what actually grows this time of year

Care to share the DIY planter plans?

Outside in a place that gets full sun for most of the day.

ah good to know - did you plant them outdoors or indoors?