The Source · Research
§ I.r Research 4 entries

Research.

Research-tier pieces: regional history, culture, and watershed-scale analysis.
i.

Acequia — Water as Culture in San Antonio

The San Antonio acequia system: 300 years of gravity-fed irrigation, communal governance, and indigenous water knowledge that turned the upper San Antonio River into one of the most productive agricultural systems in North America. What it was, how it worked, and what it still teaches.

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ii.

The Mission Garden Palette — Three Centuries of Proven Plants for San Antonio

Pomegranate, fig, olive, peach, grape, corn, beans, squash, prickly pear. The plant palette that fed San Antonio's missions from 1731 onward — and what a Hill Country property owner can plant from that same palette today.

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iii.

Mesquite — Food, Fuel, Medicine, Music

Honey mesquite is the most useful single tree in South Texas. Pods to flour, wood to charcoal and instruments, sap to medicine. The tree most contractors clear was, for thousands of years, a food crop.

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iv.

Yucca — One Plant, Ten Uses

Soap, fiber, food, medicine, fire, ceremony, and ornamental anchor — all from a single genus already growing in the Hill Country. A field guide to yucca as resource, not decoration.

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