Jadene Mayla DIY: do-it-yourself projects for urban, suburban, and rural life

NEW! Food Forest Mastery mini course

Grow A Food Forest

If you’ve been paying attention these last few years, you’ve probably noticed a few alarming developments. From inflation to millions of undocumented persons flooding across our southern border to the globalist ‘elite’ plan to take control of the world’s food supply, the U.S.A. is heading down an unsavory path. Essentially, yesterday was a great time to start using permaculture.

Luckily, you can still take targeted, strategic action to secure your family’s access to fresh food, no matter what the nutjob elitists try to do. A permaculture food forest is perfect for DIY implementation if you’re:

overwhelmed by the amount of info out there on the subject
don’t want to change careers to become a designer
or simply desire to get some roots in the ground as soon as possible.

Like I said, yesterday was the ideal time to get started on this. At least you can begin before the store shelves empty again or plants and seeds become scarce or too expensive.

I know this all sounds dire, but trust me; I have been paying keen attention, and it’s simply the fact of the matter today. If you want to survive what is in progress as I write this, you will need to take steps now to grow our own food, cache storm water, build soil, attract and feed precious pollinators, become more interdependent with your neighbors, earn an income at least partially from your home or yard, and establish or fortify shelter from the elements and intruders.

November 4, 2022 0 Comments

Jadene Mayla Water and Drought

Permaculture in Oregon

Oregon Permaculture: Challenges and Opportunities

Do you want to engage permaculture on your property in Oregon? If so, it helps to understand the unique challenges and opportunities you have in this green state. Permaculture was developed by an Australian, so it is uniquely capable of healing desertified lands. However, with the amount of storm water many parts of your state receive, you can make the best of what this powerful discipline has to offer.

Challenges for Oregon Properties

One of the biggest hurdles my clients face is the abundance of water. Combine that with colder temperatures during the winter season and you can get frost pockets. A frost pocket is a patch where the ground is frozen or covered in frost for longer periods, making it tough to grow plants there. Another aspect to this combination of seasonal conditions for Oregonians is drainage issues. This is likely familiar to you as you read this, because it is a common issue. If you’re new to the state or have just purchased property, this happens when soil is either slow-draining, high clay content, or the grade of your yard does not support good drainage.

Luckily, these issues can easily be solved by the application of permaculture principles.

August 4, 2022 0 Comments

Jadene Mayla Landscape Activism: effect change at the root, The Lives of Plants

Southampton New York Top Five Plant List

Plants To Boost Your Southampton Property

In permaculture design, I use elements that offer multiple benefits. This is known as stacking functions. This is no different if you are considering plants or hardscape features. Today I’m going to share my top five plant picks for Southampton yards, plants with more than just one beneficial quality.

1. 1. Agastache nepetoides – Yellow Giant Hyssop is a beautiful native plant that is threatened statewide. Planting it in your yard can help save this plant as well as provide critical habitat for birds and other beneficial pollinator species which rely on it for food and shelter. Agastache as a genus offers many colors, and this species has the same beautiful greyish-green leaves as others in this genus. The scent is no less than glorious, explaining what drives bees so crazy around these plants.

July 7, 2022 0 Comments

Jadene Mayla Zombie Permaculture

Austin Permaculture

Why Permaculture In Austin?

There are too many reasons to invest in permaculture to list in one article, so suffice it to say that NOT including permaculture will leave you paying more for less and missing out on amazing opportunities in the long run. Austin is a hot spot for short-term rentals, and so homeowners and hosts alike can incorporate this powerful form of sustainable landscape design into properties to maximize resale and perceived value. You can charge more because of perceived value, whether you are selling or renting. To see a breakdown of my calculations that show you how much you can earn when you sell a property, get my free report HERE.

Permaculture was developed in Australia and can deftly regenerate deserts into food forests. I relocated in 2022 from Southern California to West Texas in order to put it to work in a true desert landscape. While Austin has a more humid atmosphere and abundant water, permaculture can still have a surprising effect there.

In addition to raising your property’s value (to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars), it can also lower your power as well as water bills.

June 23, 2022 0 Comments

Jadene Mayla Landscape Activism: effect change at the root, Water and Drought

Creating Rain

Dry Land Rain-Making

In this article, I’m going to share my research and experience with making it rain. Nevermind the data-less climate “crisis.” The need for rain in dry environments is obvious. Well, it just so happens that human beings possess the ability to cause rain to fall. How? Let’s look at some of the methods I found.

Plant “rain trees” – species such as Ocotea foetens, the original “rain tree,” are known to condense water and shed it like

image: rain tree — Ocotea foetens grows throughout the Canary Islands and Madeira, Portugal.

rain. So much so that some villages where it grows as a native plant are able to get over 80% of their water from these trees. Another rain tree grows in the Amazonian rainforest, but Americans are very familiar with it; the Brazil Nut or Bertholletia excelsa. This species makes it rain by drawing water 14 stories from beneath the soil surface, where the leaves release it to condense as rain clouds. Half of the rainfall over the Amazon rainforest comes from trees like this one. Note: it can be difficult to find seeds or seedlings of these trees, if you wish to try your hand at cultivating them. Be sure to confirm any seeds you buy have not been boiled or otherwise treated, so that they remain viable for planting. Even if you simply plant more of any variety of trees that grow in your area, you’ll more than likely thereby cool the soil, increase moisture in the vicinity, and provide vital microclimate conditions for additional diverse species to take root. Science is perennially failing to acknowledge what people intuitively find until much later on, so while we wait for scientists to admit the next amazing breakthrough, we can plant trees!

Jadene Mayla Region by Region

Texas Permaculture

Texas Permaculture – Will It Work?

image: Texas permaculture In the state of Texas permaculture works just as well if not better than in other states. Like our clients in California, Oregon, New Jersey, North Carolina, Washington, Nevada, and more, Texas land and home owners are a diverse group of individuals. The climate of the state of Texas varies quite a bit from the humid coast and eastern half of the state to the desert of the far wild west.

This diversity represents an opportunity. Let’s take the west Texas desert, for instance. In this part of Texas the principles of permaculture can be applied to make soil fertile for growing fruit trees and edible perennials and shrubs. Permaculture can also be applied to infuse the soil subsurface of the desert bentonite-rich soil there with water. Permaculture works despite the tendency of soil in that particular part of Texas to shed water overland and be quite dry most of the year.

In Texas, Permaculture Can Increase Land Owner Profits

Applying principles use in this design discipline, land owners can boost productivity of their land-based business. Productive land is true wealth. It isn’t called real estate for nothing. Getting unproductive or degraded land into optimal functioning shape so that it produces the maximum profits is very doable when permaculture is utilized. It can restore pretty much any landscape in any condition.

There are different regional and microclimates across this large land mass. Therefore, the techniques will change depending on where in Texas you own your property, but the strategies are similar. If this transformative technology can reclaim the Sahara Desert, then it can do wonders for any other type of landscape.

The best way to implement permaculture in any landscape is to have a plan. A plan is a tool that allows property owners to execute all of the various elements and techniques in a structured and ordered way that minimizes costs and maximizes success, while allowing for paced implementation over time.

To learn more or get a professional permaculture plan for any property, reach out to us.

May 2, 2022 0 Comments

Jadene Mayla Water and Drought

How Permaculture Creates Water

How Does Permaculture Create Water?

Can you actually create water? I’ll leave that question for another time, but you can definitely find water where it doesn’t seem to be. You can also make a smaller amount of water go farther. How can you create water with permaculture? By observing and doing earthworks.

What are earthworks? Earthworks are simply the molding of the landscape into forms that achieve certain results. In the case of water, earthworks can help you to slow it down if it is moving too fast so that you can utilize it before it escapes. In Old Town Pasadena, California, I observed gushing fountains of water being lost to storm drains when it rained. I wondered then why the city, indeed the County of Los Angeles, wasn’t proactively capturing that amazing volume of precious H20 streaming across the vast landscape there. Why weren’t those placed in charge of such things using that water to irrigate the landscape and green L.A.?

Well, let’s just say the system in place in cities across the United States is NOT geared toward water conservation. Instead, it is set up to carry as much water as possible as fast as possible out to sea!

Using earthworks, you can essentially create water with permaculture and reverse that madness. As the African man who transformed his patch of desert into a towering food forest did, you can dig pits and swales in the ground. This simple act allows surface flowing water (think rain falling on compacted or nutrient-poor dirt and sheeting off overland) to infiltrate below the surface.

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