Does your landscape provide for you?
Does your landscape provide for you? 2021 is here. Many of you will be celebrating the end of 2020 and hoping that 2021 will be different and come with some increased stability. In the past few weeks, we've seen some unusual weather patterns occurring...
Build your landscape to weather any storm
Build Your Landscape to Weather any Storm Design your landscape to thrive in extreme conditions. That's correct. Using regenerative or permaculture design practices, you inherently create a landscape that absorbs the extremes of high rainfall events as well as the...
Three questionable landscape practices
Below is a list of the top three landscape practices which I regularly see both homeowners and landscape professionals undertaking. These may seem pretty harmless, but in my opinion, they all have negative consequences for your landscape. Raking out all debris or...
Wildfires to Meadows
Wildfires to Meadows The skies have cleared, we can now breathe some fresh air. The wind blowing in intense smoke from the enormous wildfires in Washington, Oregon, and California has shifted, but the fires are far from being extinguished. The air quality over the...
Permaculture zones in your landscape
*Image above is the Beacon Food Forest Community Garden, Seattle, Washington One of the strengths of permaculture design is its use of zones within this landscape design process. When using zones to guide us during the design process, it allows us to observe and take...
Why do we love our lawns?
Why do we love our lawns? The use of lawns within our communities has a deep history within our human habitat. As hunter-gatherers, we noticed that vast savannas made it much easier to track and hunt wildlife. In 1159 there are reports of a technique used in Japan...
Five Ways to Create an Abundant Landscape
Five Ways to Create an Abundant Landscape There is nothing quite like witnessing abundance in your landscape. What do we mean when we refer to a landscape as abundant? Here's one definition, a profusion, a great plenty, an overflowing quantity. How do we take our...
Five Alternatives to Backyard Burning
I live on Vancouver Island within the Regional District of Nanaimo. The RDN covers a large area spanning from Bowser down to South Nanaimo and Cedar. With the current pandemic involving the COVID-19 virus, the BC Government has placed restrictions on open burning in...
Passive Rainwater Harvesting to the Rescue
Like many property owners who live on acreage, we rely on a rock pit or drainage pit to handle or infiltrate the water coming from our residence roof area and perimeter drains. Last fall, we discovered that our rock pit had failed, which is very common for a home 40+...
OSU Online Rainwater Harvesting Course discount code
I will be instructing an online Rainwater Harvesting course that includes content from Brad Lancaster, author of "Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond" This course just finished its inaugural run this fall, and after a few minor changes, it's set to start on...