Core Maps #2: The Permaculture Sun Map
Kate Lynn is always camera-ready
On Jan. 15, filmmaker John Borgquist set up cameras to interview us about the Tiger Project. We don’t yet know if it's documentation or documentary, but if nothing else it’s an excuse to hang out with John, who's great. He interviewed me solo, then me and Kate Lynn together, then Kate solo, capturing an early baseline of our hopes for the project. Months from now, I’m sure I’ll watch this footage and cringe at my responses, my hubris. But for now, it’s fun.
When Jack came home from school, I asked if he wanted to be interviewed, too.
“No,” he said, “we have work to do.” He was referring to the mapmaking which he’s just as into as you might imagine. He grabbed his colored pencils and we got to business.
How To CREATE A SUN MAP
Now that we have our Base Map, the next step (according to Tenth Acre Farm) was creating a Sun Map. The idea is to figure out the best/worst areas for growing food, and, in our case, siting solar panels.
We used the Sun Seeker app which costs a few bucks but it has an augmented reality function so you can view the sun’s path across your sky at different times of year—when it will peek over and set back behind the tree line in any given spot. Most folks will tell you to focus on the sun’s path during the summer solstice (June 20). You then mark the areas that get:
Full Sun (6+ hours)
Partial Sun (3-6 hours), or
Full Shade (less than 3 hours).
We went with yellow, blue and brown, respectively.
As Jack and I moved around the property, I’d operate the app and call out colors to him to mark up the map. Of course, he’s five, so the placement was sometimes way off.
Involving our kids will mean letting go of any semblance of precision, I realized. Kate is a perfectionist and I’m definitely into getting things done as well as possible, and it’s immediately clear that the project will test us in that way—to avoid placing these kinds of expectations on our kids when we invite them to help. It’s going to be janky af.
That will have to be okay and/or we’ll get good at redoing stuff after they fall asleep.
After Jack created his version of the Sun Map I went out with the Sun Seeker app to do a more thorough survey.
How To Read the Sun
A little more detail on using this Sun Seeker app, if you're into sun mapping: I mapped according to the summer solstice, the red line on the app's 3D augmented reality interface. When the red line is under the tree line or otherwise obscured by branches or structures, that means it’ll be shady at that time of day where you’re standing.
So, from this particular spot in our backyard (see images), the sun rises over the tree line in between the 9 and 10am dots (so, around 9:30am), gets covered by some limbs around 12pm, and it's then sunny again from about 2-6pm. That's about 6.5 hours of sun in that spot. So, yellow!
Analyzing results from Your Sun Map
Much of it was obvious—I get that the woods are shady; that's kind of their thing—but the process helped me realize that there's a good sunny spot to the west of the pool, a lot of sun in the North Field and the front yard, all good spots for gardens.
This process can also show that removing a single tree or even tree branch helps open up the sky at a certain spot of your property, making it sunnier for gardening, for instance.
This process also showed us that the roof of our house, meanwhile, is pretty shady, mostly on account of the giant maple tree growing through the back deck and an ash tree in the Southeast Lawn. That makes it not so good for, say, roof-mounted solar panels. And I’m not sure we want to spend the money to take down these huge trees.
So we had to get a little creative.