I wasnt thinking on changing the current metod or getting rid of belts completely, just adding a secondary recipe.... and the main target was the bio gardens. Small changes, nothing big.
Even small changes are big in BI, with all the testing needed for different configurations … :-)
I've added fluid fertilizers for the next version. They can only be used with Bio Gardens because it makes most sense there (when solid fertilizer + water are replaced with fluid fertilizer, belts and inserters aren't needed at all -- the other recipes still require these for other ingredients).
With hidden poles on the gardens, would be very easy to just spread a lot of gardens to control pollution.
I don't really like the idea of hidden poles here because you can't see what is connected. Solar panels would be an idea to make the Bio gardens independent, but they come too late in the research tree to be used as ingredient in Bio Gardens, and I also can't imagine a cozy garden with solar cells standing around.
(After a night's sleep on this: Hidden poles are probably the way to go. They would be cheaty, but fluid fertilizer is already cheaty, so why not go all the way? So, I plan to always add hidden poles to the gardens, but make their wire reach 0 unless the option for fluid fertilizers is active. Would that be OK with you?)
About a big garden or something, i can make something and send you, i just suck on creating sprites, if i do something, i will use some tree sprites from the game or other mod, merge and create something that resembles the idea.
If you still want to do that, please go ahead! If you can provide some nice graphics, it shouldn't be that hard to define a bigger garden! :-)