Example of Work Where it Counts!

How to address water activity and erosion high up on a property?
Rather than spending money addressing the spot in a water line where we most see the damage, a more effective and budget-honoring approach is to observe the water during a high rain event, chart where it's going and where it's not, and strategize an ecologically sensitive approach to collaborating with water. Start high in the landscape, create swales, check dams or re-direct the water to course via swales to more slowly infiltrate water through a slope. Over time we save money and preserve the integrity of the land down below, in addition to creating a spot mid-slope that will be passively irrigated via swales. Win-win.

Boulders for micro-climates? Are you on a north facing slope and interested in growing marginally tropical plants? While Asheville and surrounds have experienced a shift in planting zones, boulders and thermal mass elements can help the warm loving plants to get more established, and give them protection and reflect heat even in the winter months. Think brick walls, accent boulders, ponds, slowing the air down around the area, to achieve the desired heat zone for your apricot, yaupon, pomegranate, or cantaloupes.

Are you seeking solutions for your land questions?  Contact Healing Roots Design for a consultation!

Land requires love and tending. Love looks like maintenance, time for tending the relationship, resources and doing what's needed at the critical ecological time to leverage a shift. Prices in the construction world are 30% higher these days, resulting in less budget for holistic landscape design.  At the helm of my small and mighty Healing Roots Design, I have seen some deeply damaged earth this year in new build situations cutting corners, and clients unable to put more than $5k together for $20+K jobs for "emergency services'', as I have come to call it, to stabilize and cover denuded slopes, reforest, add earthworks to mitigate flumes of water down scarred slopes, terrace, and hold back the mountain from generating a creek full of topsoil.  Soil erosion, water channels through front yards, a shift of earth from one week to the next on fragile slopes, I deeply feel for the haggardness of the earth and the lack of components of stewardship from people who want my staff to be miracle workers on a shoestring curtailing all the damage in a season.

I note a staggering disconnect that people purchase $650K homes and think $5K for landscape. I wonder what contributes to this disconnect? Is it because humans consider the land as an afterthought? Is there an internalized discounting passed on to people who work with the land? Have we become so fixated on the built environment that the earth continues to live on scraps of care, love and attention? Has our transactional society and the last 2 year's surge of screen time further damaged the transformations that occur right outside our doors?  I'd like to hear from lovers of the earth, as it's heavy on my mind, how to care for the earth and people, provide jobs with essential ecological and service function, and ensure critical restoration projects receive the love, budget, and attention visible to the untrained eye.

The pictures above are from a job we cared for over a period of time, nudging succession, curbing water erosion and stopping the bleeding of materials leaving their site. The emergency trenches and swale systems we installed that keep back the erosion of yards of topsoil have held. I am beyond pleased with the 3 phases of seeding establishing themselves!  Next up is installing trees and shrubs to fortify and stabilize the bank.

Healing Roots is available for permaculture design, install and maintenance. Reach out for more information!