I’m pretty jammed up with trees. Before I commit to a new tree I have to do a sun survey. I put in a stake in the ground and watch the spot from morning to late day to see how much sun it gets. I got my trees, neighbors’ huge trees and a house that can block the sun.
The best thing, if you can, is to do a time lapse photo survey every half hour or so. You will have sun photos and not just notes. I am spread all over, so I have to take photos by hand, covering many directions. If you are lucky and can do it on one direction you can set your camera up on a tripod and shoot it that way.
Before each hourly set of photos is made, I record the time by writing it on a piece of paper and I take a photo of it right at the beginning of the set. Maybe the sun’s path changes every month some, but we just got to do the best we can figuring it out unless we got lots of space and sun blockage is not a concern.
Does anyone else recall the light-sensitive paper that we used for creative projects as children? We would lay it outside with some two or three dimensional object atop and it would print a relief image just from the exposure to the sunlight? I don’t recall if it turned from white to a hue of blue or the other way around. I have wished that there were a kit of something similar, a photo-sensitive paper that doesn’t need development with chemicals. You would just place it in position, attach it to the ground with a landscape stake, leave it from sunup to sundown, and then compare the color that it had developed against the sunlight intensity scale that accompanied it so you could see whether that area had six, eight, ten hours of direct-sunlight equivalency, then you could determine by mapping with these inexpensive papers where some specific plant could be successfully located.
(above picture is from someone else’s online blog)
Now they I know that you can make this product yourself it makes me wonder how challenging it would be to adjust the chemical treatment of the paper in order to slow the exposure reaction and create a product with enough consistency in results that it could be put to accurate use like in my post above.
I do the sun survey before planting my trees. I do it a year before I plant them, if I plan on planting them in the spring. I physically go outside and place markers where the sun it at different times of the day. I have a lot of trees and the amount of sun changes from the spring leaves to the full summer leaves. So I have to be careful where I plant my fruit trees.
Yeah…l have a good 100 acres of forest to my west with tall pines, oak, and hemlock. Every year my sunsets get a little earlier as the tree canopy increases.
I have a row of blue spruce to my south as well. In the summer they’re no problem. But I situated my chicken coop/run a decade ago so it would get full sun in the winter over those trees. Now they’re starting to shadow the birds out a few weeks either side of the winter solstice. I’m probably going to have to take those out. I guess that means more room for fruit trees.
When planting on the north side of my house a few years back, I cheated and used security camera footage.
I had had my cameras set to take a snapshot every hour of every day and had 10+ years of data available in that archive. I then went through the snapshots every day for an entire year to identify where I had sunlight and where I had shade (ignoring cloudy days, mostly skipping the dormancy months) to figure out where to plant my blueberries.
Pretty easy that way to know exactly how many hours of sunlight each spot gets throughout the year. Fun discovery was that the north-facing deck on my house got a sliver of sunlight for a few hours only in the summer months so that’s where I have some thriving arctic raspberries as they seem to hate sunlight!
I paid a few bucks for the Sun Surveyor app on my iPhone years ago. I’ve used it many times since. Well worth the price. It will show you the sun’s path in the sky from the perspective of your phone’s position for any date you want to look at.
It does, but Wikipedia says that the process is actually the result of potassium ferricyanide and the either ferric ammonium citrate or ferric ammonium oxalate with which the paper was chemically treated. The indigo dyes and pigments I’ve just read about are chemically rather different.
