Two recent bills make significant adjustments to water use and costs in California. Here’s what you need to know and what you can do.
The two big issues we’ll cover are reduced water usage and increased water rates. Senate Bill 606 and Assembly Bill 1668 went into effect in 2019 but won’t be enforced until 2021, so you have a little time to prepare. But how should you do that?
Did you know that wild creatures perform what are called ‘ecosystem services’ and that if you provide habitat for beneficial wildlife they can help you reduce your maintenance and utility costs while increasing your property value?
Take a look at this short video to learn more and get a FREE strategy specific to your property by signing up HERE.
It’s easy to lower your landscape maintenance bills by attracting beneficial wildlife. You can use permaculture to create a low-cost, food-producing oasis in your yard.
Maybe you’ve heard the term permaculture. What is this, you’re probably wondering. Well, permaculture is a design discipline, like landscape design, architecture, or graphic design. It is the application of a specific set of principles to the design process. There are also specific techniques involved in the process. The main difference between permaculture and other design framework is that the focus is ecological restoration and/or the establishment of self-supporting ecological systems on a site.
One of the things that’s exciting about this is that this design discipline can be applied to any size property or landscape. Over the almost
16 years that I have been a professional permaculture designer, I’ve created Read More
Before a Transition Pasadena steering meeting this past Fall, I came outside looking for one of my cats just in time to see him playing with something he seemed very interested in. Unfortunately, it was a hummingbird.
Rain. Some of us get more of it than others. In some cities it pours most of the year, while in others total annual rainfall is measured in a tuna can. You might not need to conserve as much water if you get a lot of rain. But even in high-precipitation areas of the country (and world), it’s more about infiltration than how much rain falls.
Infiltration is king when it comes to making the most use of rainfall. In areas where soil is exposed and compacted, water can’t make its way in. Instead, it sheets over the top of the soil. This means it ends up in the ill-conceived street drainage system. I say ill-conceived because the storm water engineering we’re all living with was designed to carry water away, not into, the landscape.
I recently considered how many people have told me they don't know what restorative design really means. I spend a 
good deal of time answering questions like, "what is green infrastructure," "is a swale paved," and that kind of thing. And these questions don't only come from my clients. I've found that a lot of builders aren't familiar with ecology. They install jobs according to 'traditional' methods.
Some factors of climate change are malleable. Whether or not Earth Changes are natural or man-made, it is a fact that human beings can directly impact local temperature, moisture, soil health, wildlife habitat, and food availability. This article discusses Trump Forest, planted in 2017 in response to the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and our president’s executive order forcing the EPA to rewrite the Clean Power Plan to prioritize energy production. I’ll also discuss the success of the forest and make recommendations for other things we can all do to restore the functioning of the landscape as a climate-stabilizing powerhouse.
The goal of Trump Forest was to plant 10 million trees around the world. This would, according to researchers behind the project, offset a significant amount of carbon emitted by a step backward to industry-focused energy production. The actual number of trees planted ended up being 1,409,857, so the project was cut short. But that’s still a good number of trees. Now let’s take a look at replanting survival and how to keep new trees alive.
