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Geomancer Permaculture, Lexington, KY (2026)

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."

04/12/2026

The kickoff event for Bluebell Island Food Forest in Morehead was pretty excellent. We toured the site, checked out all of the spring wildflowers putting on a show, popped in a couple elderberry live stakes as a symbolic groundbreaking, and talked about how to keep momentum going for the caretaking of this land in the future.

Counted among the attendees was a member of Morehead's City Council, the student activities coordinator from Morehead State University, and a local candidate for state congress. Perhaps most impressively, there was also a new Geomancer supporter all the way out from Louisville who just wanted to catch us at a public event!

Setting aside for a moment the topic of Bluebell Island itself - which is a beautiful project, and will continue to be documented - what we need to note here is the extent to which this work continues to find broad resonance among those looking for tangible, credible actions that can be taken to build a better world right now.

This is the core organizing principle from which Geomancer operates, and we are eternally grateful to the land for the opportunity it provides us to come together around something real.

Morehead is a totally new community for us to be working in, so it remains to be seen what role Geomancer will have in the long term development of Bluebell Island, but it is an honor to have been invited to come help the folks in Rowan County figure that out.

04/09/2026

This is not a drill! We are partnering with .evergreen and the City of Morehead to imagine Kentucky's newest food forest: Bluebell Island.

Join us this Sunday at noon right on the banks of Triplett Creek at the pavilion by the Morehead City dog park where we'll formally launch this new project and rally community support for what is sure to be an exciting new adventure.

Word is getting out! This is a real strategy that we can use to organize for a better future.

04/08/2026

We made a huge (great!) mess this weekend at our second Ecological Design workshop with .ky

Since the topic of the workshop was soil and water, we figured what better time to put the Scale of Permanence into practice by digging out the first basin of a new stormwater system to accommodate runoff sheeting from the existing patio at AVOL's new Anderson Meadow food forest.

This was a great team effort in some tough soils, and we were rewarded shortly after by getting to see how our new basin performed in a spring rain shower. Looking good!

A special thanks to the .uky students who worked this semester sampling soils on site to make sure that we weren't dealing with any heavy metal contamination before growing food and medicine in the floodplain. Y'all made some very important contributions to the early stages of this project!

This rain garden is just the start of what we have planned out at Anderson Meadow for this summer and beyond. Our next workshop is on Ethnobotany and Plant Polyculture Design, 10am May 2nd at AVOL. Come get involved!

04/04/2026

We had a great turnout tonight for our "Bring Back the Bluegrass" intervention in partnership with the Marlboro/Radcliffe neighborhood and Lexington's First Council District. Swipe to see in action clearing ground for new native habitat plantings going in at the end of the month.

This seems like an appropriate time to express our immense gratitude for the trust that neighborhood groups all over Lexington have been shown in inviting Geomancer to assist with strategic planning processes and collaborative ecological design - we don't take that trust for granted. And if you have a group that wants to get organized, we'd love to help out!

We also welcome every opportunity to reiterate that the work we're doing isn't just about planting pretty gardens, but rather about building the material networks we need to radically decentralize how all decisions are being made in our society.

04/03/2026

Jon Parker, CEO of .ky rips out the conventional landscaping at their Stonewall Terrace headquarters to replace with the native medicinal shrubby St. John's Wort (Hypericum prolificum). This week we crossed the milestone of having added over 200 plants across ten new species (and counting!) to AVOL's burgeoning Anderson Meadow food forest.

It can seem a little trite to describe ourselves or a partner such as AVOL as being "community based" organizations, but if it means anything at all it probably means something like getting out and digging your own garden, or in our case at least catering to the kind of clients who are excited to come help us dig in their gardens!

We're so excited to see this partnership continue to mature. Our next ecological design workshop is this Saturday (tomorrow!) at AVOL at 10am.

04/03/2026

Last week we had the unexpected but very enjoyable opportunity to plant a couple serviceberry trees (Amelanchier spp.) at Kilrush Food Forest with bonafide famous forager .greenfield (we think he gets the title of first social media influencer to visit our projects 😅)

Barefoot as the day he was born, Robin wasted no time rolling up his sleeves and busting up some of the heavily compacted urban soil we have at Kilrush, which is a challenge for all but the hardiest plants (and more than a few volunteers).

We were impressed with Robin's commitment to his foraging journey, as he declined to snack on any of the food forest's glorious early season delectables since it is - technically speaking - a cultivated space.

There's really an enormous Venn diagram where the worlds of agriculture, foraging, and community organizing come together, and it was great to cross-pollinate a little and think about other ways to communicate about what we're doing.

Thanks for the visit, Robin! We'll let you know when the serviceberries are ripe 💪

Geomancer Permaculture

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