60-Minute Property Consult
25
I will help you learn how to work with the intelligence of natural systems on your property, identifying and reframing problem areas into opportunities for ecological improvement. My key objective is to help you save time, money and energy while creating a more resilient, beautiful and restful place to live.
Learning to read site ecology is helps my clients to:
* Reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events,
* Reduce long-term costs (and often short-term, too!),
* Save energy and headaches of issues gone unnoticed and unchecked,
* Create an environment that supports your and your family’s health and well-being, and
* Learn to recognize the existing opportunities to make your land easier to manage, more beautiful, fulfilling, biodiverse, alive, restorative, safe and resilient.
Over the duration of a 60-minute call, we’ll take a look at your property, and discuss how we can employ an ecologically informed, solutions-oriented perspective to change the trajectory of at least one nagging problem you're facing.
WHY AM I MAKING THIS OFFER?....
As an ecologist and farmer by birth and nature, I've spent decades learning to read patterns of weather, erosion, soil deposition, plants and wildlife. It's my passion. I'm always looking at the evolution and succession, or progression, of landscape elements, whether it's a weedy patch, a gaping hole in a trail after a heavy rain, or a bare, grassless patch in the horse pasture.
As a permaculture design consultant, this process of reading site ecology starts with a site visit to my client's property - ideally in person, occasionally through a combination of Zoom or Skype, Google Earth, and some photos from the ground.
Usually they, and I, are excited to get the design process started.
But all too often, as we get to know each other, they also express overwhelm and frustration, and are afraid to start - afraid of doing the wrong thing, making a bad situation worse, creating problems they don't anticipate, or wasting time, energy, money and materials on something that just doesn't do what it was supposed to do.
What’s more is that often, they’re not even concerned about something that leaps out at me. Sometimes they, or a previous owner, have inadvertently created the conditions for a potential disaster down the road. Worse, they don’t realize that the longer it takes them to change the trajectory of that error and the system associated with it, the bigger, uglier, more expensive, more time-consuming it’s going to get -- and the more they’re going to procrastinate on fixing it.
These are critical errors and it's my mission to make sure you don't make them, so that you can save time, energy and headaches -- and often money, too. But more importantly -- I help people engage with their landscape and innate knowledge, as living organisms in a living environment. When this happens, it enables us to access and then co-create our own answers, rather than relying on the expertise of others.
Training & Qualifications
* Bachelor of Science, Ecology (University of Calgary, 2010)
* Masters of Evolutionary Ecology (Universite Montpellier II & Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2012)
* Permaculture Design Certificates (2012, Jordan with Geoff Lawton; 2015 Quail Springs Permaculture; currently completing Permaculture Women's Guild Online PDC and Advanced Social Permaculture Certificates); taught in multiple PDCs
* Regrarians 10-Day Live Consultancy Training and Farm Planning (March 2016, Orella Ranch, CA) with Darren Doherty
Availability & Preferences
Typically available between 10 AM and 4 PM Fridays through Tuesdays, but flexible