How to determine a starting point for surveying: Dams For me the starting point to survey is often a dam for high water storage. Dams are a major investment and it’s a must to have specific characteristics to construct the dam particular to that site. What I look for is the shortest dam wall possible to hold the most amount of water while staying as high as possible. These major […]

This is Part 3 in a Series about using permaculture design principles to train your “lizard-brain” – a name I’ve used to refer to the regions of your brain that are responsible for keeping you safe and comfortable.[i] In Parts 1 and 2 of this Series we met the lizard in your brain, found out how it’s responsible for behaviors like procrastination and avoidance, and began to explore the idea […]

So, you have been contacted by a client and you’ve discussed the client’s brief. You’ve started to look at the contour map, aerial images, whatever data you can find on the site. And with the client brief in mind, always remembering WATER IS LIFE, you set to the task of patterning the landscape using functional forms. You start to look at what’s the most economical way to hold water in […]

I love discovering new, useful plants to incorporate into garden design schemes. Of course, there are a great number of plants many of us have never heard of, let alone know how to utilize, but one of the great things about the permaculture mindset is that it constantly yields wonderful, unfamiliar flora to cultivate. There are many ways a plant or tree can be useful. Food is one that we […]

This is Part 2 of a series about the “lizard brain” – made up of the oldest parts of the human brain, (Please see Part 1 of this Series for a note about my use of the term, “lizard brain.”) The lizard brain co-exists with our more recently evolved brain regions and can cause all kinds of havoc if we don’t understand how to make good use of it. To summarize […]

  With organic gardening, especially at the outset, comes a few new challenges for transitioning growers. Pesticides and other chemicals have, for several decades, become the go-to solution for all things in the garden, and now that many of us are clearing our heads from that fog, we are left to rediscover methods for dealing with everyday garden problems.  When herbicides have been the trick for combating weeds, how do […]