A working library on what San Antonio and the Texas Hill Country actually provide — water, food, fiber, medicine, shelter, ceremony, song. Yucca for soap. Mesquite for bread. Acequias for water. Mission palettes for the table. Less consumer noise. More ecological literacy. A way of belonging to a place again.
Compost is the physical input that makes every other landscape decision work. Microbial diversity, the soil food web, the three-pile system, and why a properly composted bed grows a tomato that tastes different from one fed by bagged fertilizer.
~30 inches of rain land on Bexar County each year. Every drop is on a journey from cloud to leaf to soil to Edwards Aquifer or to gulf. Treating water as something that travels through the property — not flows from a meter — is the difference between catchment thinking and utility thinking.
A half-acre Hill Country property generates 2–4 cubic yards of biomass a year. Hauled out: cost. Kept on site: input. Leaf mulch, chop-and-drop pruning, greywater branched drains, manure cycling. Each is a specific way to close a loop the city normally severs.
A mature live oak moves 40,000 gallons a year and drops ground temperature 10–15°F. A pecan, a mesquite, a porch arbor. Canopy is built mass — passive cooling, energy savings, food, habitat, vernacular architecture. The clearcut lot loses all of it at once.
A 2,500 sq ft Bexar County roof catches 46,000 gallons a year. A half-acre lot intercepts 410,000. The only question is whether the property is stewarded as a watershed or wasted as one. Berms, bioswales, cisterns, foundation drains — the tools of parcel-scale hydrology.
A turf lawn is one species. A Noon native install is 30–80. A documented Edwards Plateau prairie is 200+. Species count is a resilience metric — biological, economic, cultural. Layered planting, hedgerows, polyculture food gardens. The lawn is the visible symptom of monoculture; this is the alternative.
Topsoil, B-horizon clay, caliche hardpan, Edwards Limestone bedrock. The four layers under every Hill Country lot — Brackett, Tarrant, Real, Eckrant soil series — determine what roots, what holds water, what fails. The craft of reading subsurface and amending from the ground up.
Edwards Limestone, ~300 ft thick, visible in the walls of the Alamo, the missions, Hill Country fences, the River Walk. The plants the limestone supports (Ashe juniper, persimmon, mountain laurel). The food it grows. The buildings it makes. When local resource and local culture cohere, identity emerges. When they don't, it breaks.
A working library, not a marketing blog. Why we publish — the difference between writing about ecology and writing from a job site, and what a Public Benefit landscape practice is for.
Slope, drainage, soil, sun, existing canopy. The five readings we do on every property before any line gets drawn — and what each one tells us about what will hold up.
Hill Country caliche is calcium-carbonate hardpan, not soil. You can't bury it or chemically defeat it — you break it mechanically, amend the backfill, and plant the palette that evolved on top of it.
Mulch pays back more than any other intervention in Texas summer. Native hardwood on beds, leaf mulch from on-site canopy, DG on paths. Cedar belongs on paths, not under plants. Rock bakes root zones.
Bagged compost is mostly pine bark. Real soil-building runs an on-site three-pile system on a 3:1 browns-to-greens ratio, closes the property's nutrient loop, and raises organic matter year over year.
The plants that already know how to live here — anchor trees, small flowering trees, shrubs, perennials, groundcovers. And what we don't plant, and why.
Sun reads first. The plants that thrive on a south-west bake versus a north-east face versus dappled shade versus deep shade — and when to cut each one back.
Mission-garden lineage in modern Hill Country: persimmon, pomegranate, fig, prickly pear, Mediterranean herbs. Trees that pay you back, integrated into the ornamental palette.
Why synthetic ant killer fails long-term. Howard Garrett's orange oil + molasses + compost-tea mound drench, beneficial nematodes, and the predator habitat that holds colonies down for good.
The escalation ladder: water blast, garlic-pepper tea, neem oil, beneficial release. Why systemic neonicotinoids are a disaster and what to use instead.
A property that hosts predators needs less management. Ladybugs, lacewings, parasitic wasps, native bees, ground beetles. The host plants and habitat features that bring them and keep them.
Engineered drainage that builds habitat instead of hiding water. The cross-section, the planting palette, and why a bioswale beats a French drain on a Hill Country lot.
The catchment math, the components, the cistern sizing for a half-acre property. What it really costs, what it actually saves, and when it pays back against SAWS rates.
Spray loses 30% to TX summer evaporation. Drip drives deeper roots. The Noon stack: drip for beds, microspray for veg, rotor for native grass establishment, nothing for lawn. Pre-dawn only.
Soap from the root. Cordage from the leaves. Food from the flowers and fruit. Documented medicine. Friction fire. A sculptural anchor in the landscape. The yucca outside the porch is the same plant ancestral Southwestern peoples used to wash, tie, eat, and start fire — and none of that function has gone away.
The "weed tree" South Texas ranchers spent a century clearing was, for thousands of years, an agricultural staple — pods to flour, wood to BBQ and instruments, sap as documented medicine, nitrogen-fixer and filtered shade. The most useful single tree in the region, hiding in plain sight.
Spanish engineering on Coahuiltecan river knowledge, 300 years of commons-style governance, seven channels through San Antonio, one Spanish colonial aqueduct still in original use. The bioswales we build today inherit the engineering. The governance is what we lost.
Pomegranate, fig, peach, Mustang grape, the Three Sisters, Mediterranean herbs, prickly pear. Three centuries of selection by the four San Antonio missions already proved this palette works here. A property planting from it is not making a vibe — it's continuing a documented horticultural tradition.