Turning Drainage Nightmares into Food & Water Security for Sheila H. in Scottsdale
On-site design direction: Clint Culberson, Galaxy Gardens
Design process: Jérémy Chevallier
Site plans & 3D renderings: Prachi Kothari
Sheila & her husband approached us with big drainage problems around the foundation of their house, as well as a desire to garden more but without tons of additional work.
Based on Google Earth data, drone footage and an on-site visit from the G.O.A.T. of Phoenix permaculture landscaping himself Clint Culberson, we designed a comprehensive, permaculture-informed system that eliminates drainage issues and redirects that stormwater into a future above-ground tank, as well as ground-level basins around a diversity of desert-adapted fruit trees including:
Pakistani mulberry (west shade microclimate)
Grapefruit & lemon (north side evergreens)
Peach & apple
Pomegranate
But food forests are so much more than just fruit trees, aren’t they? We also planned out the understory/shrub/ground cover layers with perennial fruits & vegetables like strawberries, artichokes, asparagus, and all kinds of herbs & native Sonoran desert pollinator species. You can find a growing list of them on our Recommended Plants page.
Long-term, Sheila & her husband envision leveraging their “back 40” space as an extension to their food forest, with a guest house (ADU) in the center of it, so we included that vision in our design phase deliverables.
This plan is now handed off to Galaxy Gardens for installation, and we will update this page with build photos/video when it’s complete. We can’t wait to see this place in 20 years!
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