Afro-Indigenous Permaculture Design | Root Life
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Walk → Design → Build → Tend

Design the land so it feeds itself

Permaculture consultation, design and build from Root Life. We read what a piece of ground is already doing, draw a plan it can carry, put it in with our own hands, and come back while it establishes.

This is the same practice behind our own growing rooms and beds in New Haven — not a service line bolted onto a farm, but the method the farm runs on.

Walk Your Land With Us See the scales we work at
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Four stages · enter at any one

What the work actually is

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Six scales

From a back yard to a whole holding

Where we have completed work, we say so. Where we have not, we say that too — a scale we are ready for is not the same as a scale we have delivered.

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Starting prices are the published model you chose, and no figures have been supplied — so none are shown. Seven numbers finish this page:

A consultation day rate · and a “from” figure for each of the six scales. Design and build can quote separately if that is truer to how you price.

Who draws the design

Design is led by Native Praxis

Native Praxis holds multiple Permaculture Design Certificates, including the qualification to teach permaculture courses. That is the formal training, and it is only half of what shapes a plan.

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The other half is lineage. Native Praxis is an Afro-Indigenous grower whose people come out of the American deep south, and that ancestral practice is worked directly into the design process — not quoted as decoration, and not treated as a style.

Southern growing knowledge was carried, adapted and kept alive under conditions designed to erase it. Bringing it to a site plan is a continuation of that work, not a reference to it.

Youth work the build

Installations are staffed in part by paid youth apprentices from our own programs, on the same $21/hour floor as the rest of the crew.

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Your build teaches somebody a trade. That is the arrangement, and you should know it before you hire us rather than read it afterwards as a nice surprise.

See the apprenticeship tracks

What we turn down

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The soil comes from here too

Every bed we build gets fed with compost we make ourselves — including vermiculture castings worked from the spent mushroom substrate and microgreen mats of our own growing rooms.

A design that depends on bagged inputs trucked in from elsewhere is a design that stops working when the supply does. We would rather hand you a loop.

Read the compost loop

Before the walk

Tell us about the ground

Where the land is, how big it is, what you want from it, and what it has been. Answer what you can, so the first conversation starts from your site rather than from a list of questions.

We read every intake ourselves, usually within three business days. If the fit is wrong we will say so, and where we can we will point you to someone closer to you.

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