Yucca for soap. Mesquite for bread. Acequias for water. Free.
Paid for in the ground by the patrons who hire the work — their library, opened to you.
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.
A reading you can do in an afternoon, and a confirmation that holds up in front of a grant reviewer or a council. The two tiers — calibrated field instruments and an accredited lab — and how to tell which is which.
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.
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.
~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.
Lime breathes, heals its own cracks, and pulls carbon back out of the sky as it cures. The lime cycle, Rome's self-healing concrete, the Mesoamerican line — and why cement was a 150-year detour.
Cal, Maya blue, baba de nopal, cochineal, tezontle, sascab — the mineral palette that built Tenochtitlán and runs through San Antonio's missions and acequias. Inheritance, not costume.
Before you go — see your own land
Type an address and get its Sensorial Choice reading — soil, water, shade, and the score. Free, no signup to run it.
Read your land →Or get field notes every other Friday: