Services and Solutions

We believe that the landscape should serve as an extension of the built environment – spaces not to just be viewed from the street, but ones that provides peace and enjoyment for those living and working in them.  Likewise, the built environment should provide spaces that are welcoming and life-affirming.

We work closely with our clients to assemble a combination of established patterns that provide flow and varying degrees of privacy and intimacy throughout the built environment and landscape, passing between indoor and outdoor spaces as seamlessly as possible.

We strive to live by the idea that the “problem” in one place is most often an excess resource that can be redirected to become the “solution” in another part of the landscape. This approach helps us identify passive resources (sun/shade, wind, water) that might otherwise be missed with a more conventional eye. The end result is a landscape that requires less maintenance over time, provides spaces of varying levels of privacy and intimacy, is aesthetically pleasing – and can provide substantial yields in organic fruits and vegetables.

Are you experiencing seepage problems in your basement? Soft and wet areas close to your house? Areas that have consistent low-lying water? We can probably help you with that!

Water can be either one of the most destructive or life-creating forces in the world, the difference is always to be found in the surrounding context. Our commitment to understanding the context first helps us identify innovative ways to turn your “problem” into a “solution” somewhere else in the landscape.

One of our longer term clients reached out to us to give them a plan for a steep south-facing slope that forms a bowl in the area off the front face of their house. The area is overrun with wild grasses, and had to be mowed with a string trimmer at least once per year. They had asked 3-4 conventional landscapers for a plan to do something with this space, not a single one of them ever called them back.

What I’m sure those landscapers saw as a problem space was brimming over with opportunity from our perspective. We spotted a nearby erosion problem from a gutter downspout, and instead redirected that unused resource towards the new garden. At the same time, we improved overall access by putting in a main access path along the top of the garden. This path was designed in a way to very slowly transmit water flow across the slope from one end of the garden to the other, and doubled as a core part of a passive water distribution system for the redirected downspout.

If you have a landscaping problem or situation that you don’t know what to do with, we can help!

Thoughtfully harnessing the energy of the sun and wind and holding on to that energy longer can help significantly reduce heating and cooling costs over the longer term through smart building design based on well-established passive solar patterns.

Our principal designed his house that is heated almost entirely by the combination of a small basement wood stove and less than 2 cords of firewood per year, passive solar gain through well-placed windows, residual heat from cooking, general indoor activity, and circulating air through the main floor with fans. A/C loads are reduced in the summer by overhangs and window treatments that shade windows from the sun’s rays and good ventilation during the nighttime that pulls cooler air inside. Exceptional insulation holds on to heat longer in the winter and keeps it out during the summer.

Before starting any renovation work or new construction, Contact Us so we can bring our strategies for reaping big energy savings

Whether you are a newcomer to gardening and/or keeping livestock or looking to make your existing practices more resilient and regenerative, we can help. Over years of practice we have developed – and continue to develop – approaches that can increase yields and ecosystem health by putting waste products to use and creating connections between different elements in the broader system.

We believe that good ideas should be shared as widely as possible. Towards that end, we are proud to lend our knowledge towards furthering local education in permaculture theory and practice.

We have and continue to work with Midsummer Farm in their annual 72-hour Permaculture Design Course, presenting on topics such as handling water in the landscape and applying pattern language to the assessment and design process.
We have provided public presentations on permaculture practices to local organizations that include the Warwick Historical Society, Warwick Valley Gardeners, and Grow Local Greenwood Lake.

We are available for presentations on general permaculture practice as well as specific areas of focus within the permaculture approach to your public or private group. Click to Contact Us, where you can leave a message with a short description of your group and what kind of presentation/topic you’re seeking, and we will be sure to get back to you.