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Geomancer Permaculture, Lexington, KY (2026)

06/14/2026

On the second Saturday of each month, Geomancer stalwarts gather at Kilrush Food Forest in Lexington for an event we have been calling General Assembly.

One of the most important things that we can do as an organization is to cultivate political discipline and a strong internal culture. Working together on projects that materially improve our surroundings is one of the strongest ways we have to do that.

However, it cannot be stressed enough that it is utterly inadequate to try and organize simply on the basis of "common sense" or shared values. Only a distinct philosophical framework such as Marxist permaculture can give us the clarity of understanding necessary to effectively focus our common efforts.

When we started having these monthly meetings, it was seen as the bare minimum effort towards building that kind of internal culture. As the organization has grown (a recurring book club, internships, and several other projects), the monthly General Assembly remains our anchor point where every supporter knows they can find us.

And while General Assembly has most commonly been run as something like a work day, we stress that the real purpose is to provide us with an organizational framework that is both land-based and accountable.

It's not unthinkable that at some point in the future we could find ourselves without the ability or desire to communicate on social media. But that doesn't matter, because you will still be able to find us at General Assembly.

06/12/2026

A few days ago we were approached by the local news to provide perspective on Lexington KY's new moratorium on data center development as well as ongoing community efforts to organize around the issue.

There is a lot of information out there on the debate around data centers, and we will not add much here save to point out that this issue demonstrates just how quickly city council can move on something when the proper public pressure is applied. How can public advocates seize on this momentum to ensure that community-driven decision making remains the focus moving forward?

Paradoxically, while serving as proof of how quickly the presence of political will can shift a narrative, the data center moratorium also plainly demonstrates how not every issue in this city is some pressing emergency where the preferred outcome of a private consultant needs to be shoved down residents' throats before time can be taken to design for long term positive outcomes (see: new government center; urban service boundary expansion; luxury student housing).

What's most interesting, however, is how this appearance on the news to discuss an issue that at first glance has nothing to do with "permaculture" speaks to the continued growth of Geomancer's political authority as an organization. Whatever the new buzzword issue happens to be, we will be sticking to our patient, long term commitment to political education and an insistence on organizing in a way that increases our ability to make conscious decisions about how our city is governed.

06/06/2026

"Ecology without class struggle is just gardening." - Chico Mendes

This morning we finished our ecological design workshop series with .ky with a discussion on social permaculture, or in other words what are the implications of ecologically-driven design when applied to the way we organize society around us?

Complex and frank conversations were had about gentrification, housing and development, and the organic crisis of the capitalist mode of production.

None of these topics can be comprehensively covered in a single workshop, but we are making sure that the work we do to build Anderson Meadow Food Forest will never be seen as "just gardening."

We will be meeting at AVOL monthly on the first Saturday of each month moving forward - come join us!

05/31/2026

The kickoff for our urban ecology project with the Mitchell Avenue neighborhood was a smashing success!

Thanks to the generous support of a education grant, we have teamed up with the Mitchell Avenue Neighborhood Organization (MANO) in Lexington KY to develop a new program around community resilience and self-organization at the neighborhood scale.

For Geomancer, "urban ecology" isn't just about how the non-human world interacts with the urban environment; it's also about how we can apply ecological principles to the decisions being made about all aspects of how cities function.

As with all of our projects, topics such as urban tree canopy or stormwater management are really just a foot in the door to get people talking about the shared material circumstances of their lives.

There is an amazing power in just getting people together around a map of where they live and asking them to tell stories about it. People who had never met before will realize that they are neighbors, and patterns on the landscape begin to coalesce into distinct points of reference that a community can orient to when planning for the future.

Our work is simply to curate these spaces so that such conversations can unfold naturally. As neighbors work through the challenges of urban land management, they build confidence in their collective organization and, most importantly, a sense of common interests.

The work we are doing at Mitchell Avenue is being undertaken with the express intention of developing a model for urban ecology at the neighborhood scale that we can bring to supporters in other areas. This isn't some speculative pantomime of what self-governing communities could look like; it's real people making real decisions about what kind of world they want to live in.

05/30/2026

There's a joke that goes something like, "What's the proper pruning technique on a callery pear tree (Pyrus calleryana)? Answer: A single horizontal cut right at ground level."

This quip is certainly humorous and likely the correct answer in most situations, but in the interest of augmenting what Marx referred to as the wealth of subjective human sensuality, we humbly present an alternative:

This morning, neighbors and Geomancer techs gathered at Kilrush Food Forest to turn an old invasive street tree into the greenway's latest habitat feature.

Because callery pear can be so tough to get rid of, we poisoned this one with the hack-and-squirt method of herbicide application last fall in the hopes that it would simply wake up dead in the spring.

Satisfied with the efficacy of our treatment, we set about turning the former tree into a (non-hazardous) standing snag that will serve host to all manner of beneficial organisms, not the least of which is the young Concord grape (Vitis labrusca) we planted to grow right up it. It will also continue to provide some protection from the afternoon sun to the bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) planted next to it as a replacement.

We believe so strongly in this model of community forestry, where people are not just getting trained in real skills, but making meaningful decisions about how the land we live on is being managed. The cooperation and trust we build through projects like this are the foundation of what will become increasingly ambitious interventions in the future.

05/23/2026

We had such a cool time with folks from the Lexington office of who came out to Kilrush Food Forest to see what the heck we've been up to and lend a little volunteer power as part of their community engagement efforts. Thank you all so much!

Here at Geomancer, we are pretty openly experimenting with a lot of wild s**t that we couldn't have learned from anywhere else because there just wasn't anyone doing it to learn from. So to have some of these experienced landscape architects, engineers, and administrative folks take interest in our work felt really validating, and providing these tangible examples of how we can reintegrate with nature is exactly why we do this stuff.

Photo 1: A theme for the day - feasting on the wild strawberries that make up a vital part of our groundcover matrix.

Photo 2: Looking at the architecture of a hybrid white mulberry (Morus alba) that had grown in competition with invasive woody shrubs removed in the early stages of the project.

Photo 3: Putting a dent in our insane ambition to sheet mulch an entire three acre greenway. 💪

Photo 4: Checking out perennial beds at the woodland edge and a cute planter we made from a hollow log that is now host to a native creeping phlox (Phlox subulata).

Photo 5: Considering an experimental perennial polyculture of sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosus), hopniss (Apios americana), and wild mint (Mentha arvensis).

Photo 6: Exploring the food forest's woodland trails and riparian species composition along Wolf Run Creek.

05/21/2026

That's a wrap! This week we finished up plantings in the Bring Back the Bluegrass plots at Marlboro Park in Lexington.

Together with some motivated neighbors and the office of we installed over 700 tenacious native plants in an area of the park that had been maliciously mismanaged for the previous six years. Once established, these plants will be able to hold that ground and provide beautiful blooms throughout the season, initiating the transformation from what was an eyesore into vital pollinator habitat and a community asset.

We have to be quite clear that it's going to take a whole lot more than a few work days to fix the citywide embarrassment that is the abandoned Bring Back the Bluegrass program, but we are grateful to CM Morton and all of our community advocates for having helped to get a few more eyes on this issue.

Everything we're doing is about the long term. All of the plant species we've selected for this site are not only drought-adapted and physically resilient once established, but will also be easy to propagate in the future so that if we can keep up this momentum, Marlboro Park can serve as the precedent and nursery stock for repairing "Bring Back the Bluegrass" all over the city.

Whether we can fulfill that promise will ultimately be determined by the popular support and mass organization that gathers behind these efforts.

As always, the issues we face on the landscape are not the result of fundamental challenges in ecology, but simply the inadequacy of our own human social organization.

Did you know that you can join us in this work? There is so much to do, and changing the world isn't a spectator sport.

04/24/2026

We had a great time yesterday at Canopy Con '26; so grateful to have been invited out for another year to share our work and reconnect with folks from urban forestry and adjacent fields across Kentucky and beyond.

As is Canopy Con tradition, Geomancer provided one of the field demonstration stations for the afternoon portion, and this year we were asked to speak on the topic of urban food forests.

As is also tradition we went into the presentation somewhat blind, but the landscape provided generously, with dozens of mature black cherry (Prunus serotina) trees in full flower above an understory of black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis) and elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), the former full of developing fruit.

And this was just the random mid succession woodland in the back of the conference venue (our Fayette County Cooperative Extension office). So right there we were able to show a real continuum of agroecological legibility from the prepared annual garden beds closest to the office, through the ornamental landscape beds a little further out, and then finally to the unmaintained bottomland canopy beyond.

We hope that this perspective was fruitful in demonstrating how the indigenous polyculture that comprises a good chunk of our native flora is already a foundationally productive agroecosystem - every forest is a "food forest."

04/24/2026

We had a great time yesterday at Canopy Con '26; so grateful to have been invited out for another year to share our work and reconnect with folks from urban forestry and adjacent fields across Kentucky and beyond.

As is Canopy Con tradition, Geomancer provided one of the field demonstration stations for the afternoon portion, and this year we were asked to speak on the topic of urban food forests.

(As is also tradition) we went into the presentation somewhat blind, but the landscape provided generously, with dozens of mature black cherry (Prunus serotina) trees in full flower above an understory of black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis) and elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), the former full of developing fruit.

And this was just the random mid succession woodland in the back of the conference venue (our Fayette County Cooperative Extension office). So right there we were able to show a real continuum of agroecological legibility from the prepared annual beds closest to the office, through the ornamental landscape beds a little further out, and then finally to the unmaintained bottomland canopy beyond.

We hope that this perspective was fruitful in demonstrating how the indigenous polyculture that comprises a good chunk of our native flora is already a foundationally productive agroecosystem - every forest is a "food forest."

Geomancer Permaculture

06/14/2026

06/12/2026

06/06/2026

05/31/2026

05/30/2026

05/23/2026

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04/24/2026

04/24/2026

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