Pruning a 100-Year-Old Apple Tree

by erikohlsen | Feb 22, 2018 | Landscape

Greeting from a 100 Year-Old Apple Orchard! I live on a small patch of what was once a fully functioning 80-acre Gravenstien apple orchard. The orchard was planted in 1916 (over 100 years ago!) and we have 10 of these old beauties still standing on our 1-acre...

Earthen Pond Water Harvesting System

by erikohlsen | Feb 15, 2018 | Ecosystem

Greeting from …Uh, Earth? Catch and Store water from your homestead! Check out this fully integrated water harvesting system in progress. Rain from the roof of the house gets pumped to a tank storage system high on the landscape. Then overflow from the tanks feeds a...

Roof Water Harvesting: Part 1

by erikohlsen | Feb 8, 2018 | Ecosystem

Greetings from (hopefully) rainy California! Today we are talking about catching the abundance raining down from the sky! Where I live we get 3 to 4 months of rain per year and a long 8-9-month dry spell. During the dry time of year water becomes scarce and here in...

The Power of Self-Seeding Landscapes

by erikohlsen | Feb 1, 2018 | Landscape

Greetings from Coastal California! Depending on your context you may be working too hard. Are your landscape aesthetic needs making you cringe at an over grown garden? I get it! I know that feeling to want to have a beautiful looking landscape and that itch to get out...

Raging Wildfires in California Part 1: Destruction through Mismanagement

by erikohlsen | Sep 18, 2017 | Ecosystem

As I write this, wildfires continue to rage in Northern California just 40 miles from where I sit. I feel the collective grief in the community right now. I feel the grief for the animal community that is being decimated by these fires. I feel the grief of pastoral...