Assess your yard the way a professional would.
A free worksheet that walks you through the same property evaluation a permaculture designer runs — your ecoregion, your microclimates, and where water actually moves when it rains.
WHAT IT IS
Twelve pages of questions, organized into four sections. Print it, put it on a clipboard by the back door, and fill it in over weeks — not in one sitting.
Find out where you live. Your ecoregion, your Level 4 sub-ecoregion, your rainfall, and what would be growing here if no one had ever built anything.
Read your yard. Sun and shade at three times of day. Soil from three different holes. A drainage test with actual numbers. Slopes, heat zones, wind exposure, and the dry shade under your eaves. You'll finish with three to eight named microclimates.
Work with water. Your impervious surfaces, and a rain walk — the assignment is to go outside during an actual rain and watch where the water goes. Then mark where a berm, a basin, a swale, or a dry creek bed could go.
What you learned. Three opportunities, three constraints, and the spot you keep coming back to.
WHO IT'S FOR
You've got a Texas property and a vague sense that you should do something with it. Maybe you've already planted things that died. Maybe you've been reading plant lists for a year without buying anything.
Either way, the plant list isn't the problem. Nobody can tell you what to plant until you can tell them what you have.
WHAT IT ISN'T
It won't take an afternoon. The water section requires rain, which you don't control. Some questions you'll leave blank for months.
That's the design. Blank spaces are information too — they tell you what you haven't looked at yet.
Enter your email and I'll send it over. You'll also get Texas Field Notes — my letters on native plants, land stewardship, and what I'm learning working my own ground.