Cogito's Corner

First Day at the Farm

2008-04-07T19:27:00.000-07:00

Today was the first full day at Little Creek Farm. The boxes are unpacked, the studio is set up, and the office is up and running. We have a few minor details to work out still. The phone company has some wiring to do. The change of address went out today, and all in all I feel more organized and ready to go than I did at the downtown location.

The best thing that seems to be coming out of this is my "regrowth" as a gardener. Eliminating the extra driving, and not having the distractions of "office mates" It seems like I am getting things done much faster, and effectively. Of course that means I am actually getting some time in the garden. I also have more energy at the end of the day, and want to be in the garden.

I'll keep it short tonight. I am on the road tomorrow and look forward to getting out there. Things are blooming all over here in our valley. It will be interesting to see how much slower things are out there. The property 2,000 ft. higher in elevation so it will probably be a couple weeks back. I am sure I will also be glad to get back to the farm.

The Last Load

2008-04-04T18:10:00.000-07:00

The Last Load...It sounds like I would be talking about compost or mulch that I might be spreading in the garden. Nonetheless it is still a load that should feed some healthy growth. Today I moved the last load of stuff from the downtown office to Little Creek. A year and a half's worth of drawings, reams of paper, some bound uniform standards, a drafting table, chairs, and a few other odds and ends were all there to remind me of how far we have come in a year and a half. People keep telling me that it must be hard to take a step back like this after growing so fast, but I really can't help but think it is a necessary step to keep moving forward so fast.

Just a little over a year ago we were hand drawing our designs, cutting and pasting print from various Microsoft programs and making multiple trips to the printers to get a product we liked only to be thrown away and revised after one meeting. Now we are going straight from cad to online presentations, and getting revisions to our clients in hours when it used to take days. The Management Plans, Uniform Standards and Care guides we used to print and bind dozens of copies of for maybe two people to actually read would then be thrown away and reprinted with revisions. Now they are all now hosted online, and our clients can email us questions from the same page as they go through them. If this isn't growth I don't know what is.

All of this has really allowed us to do what we want to do most and do the best, which is help other people grow at what they do. There was a Broker's event at one of our properties this week, and people who represent all of our clients competition couldn't believe how good the property looked. They all asked who was hired to do the renovation, and speculated to the tens of thousands of dollars it must have taken to do the renovation. In reality the property wasn't renovated at all; they way it is cared for was.

Instead of paying absurd rates to bring in a company from out of town, we effectively have taken what six months ago was a weed eating crew and are turning them into a fine gardening crew. The client provides the materials which we project annually and quarterly. The vendor provides the labor for a lump sum to do the routine maintenance tasks, and we manage a list of to-dos for them to do in between the routine tasks. For the same price that we would pay for a maintenance crew to go their everyday for part of a day, we have full time resources who are making capital improvements that also reduce the amount of time it takes for the routine tasks. This allows us to make renovations without paying for extra crews and change orders to get them done. We are truly growing the people that are growing the place.

Just as I was hauling that last load out of the office today I realized how those guys must have felt yesterday when they were putting down that last load of mulch before the event. Six months ago they were fighting for a pay check, taking orders and being belittled by someone who really knew no more than they did. Today they have formed a legitimate company and are learning skills that will allow them to make a living long after we are gone. Not only are we growing another company for our clients to work with, but we are growing another company that we can use when we take on another client down the road. This isn't about the last load, it is about the first of many.

Spring is Coming to Little Creek

2008-03-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

Little Creek Farm is up and running for spring. In the past couple of week we have started to get some of the early spring crops in the ground. The compost piles have been turned, the livestock pens have been cleaned, and the droppings have been incorporated into the compost. The straw from the goats we take straight to the garden and mulch what will be tomato rows, because the nanny berries (goat poop) is all throughout it and breaks down like a nice slow release fertilizer.

We try to use predominately heirloom vegetable varieties. Every once in a while pull in a few hybrids, mainly when it comes to cucumbers. Everything else we really like to have open pollinated. Currently we have tomatoes, peppers, cauliflower, lemon grass, basils, and ground cherries under lights. We have sugar, snap, and English peas in the ground, along with several types of carrots, radish, beets, lettuce, kale, shallots, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. The potatoes (ten varieties) and onions are due in this week. Plus we have some more of all of the above to get in as well.

Hopefully by the end of next weekend we will have all our spring crops in and be able to focus on our forestry until the frost free date of May first. Then we can get the rest of the veggies in. We try to do as much in the woods as we can before the native wildflowers get too far along. If we can do as much of the physical exotic removal, and the selective pruning and removal before things leaf out, we can make room for nature to take over. If we can just help it nature can take over and win.

Most of the exotics move in when the logging and clearing around the forest edge occurs. The sunny varieties move in, and choke out the natives. The exotics that we are dealing with are mainly honeysuckle, bittersweet, spirea, and wine berry. All of these things get well over two feet, and the bittersweet and take over any tree. If you can cut them back, and encourage the smaller native trees around the edge, they will come back and shade them out. This can take a few years, but it is much cheaper and more environmentally friendly the nuking the place and starting from scratch.

Most of this stuff I do myself. I get some help in the Veggie Garden, and occasionally a hand in the woods. Part of moving the office here is so employees can take a whack at this stuff too. One of the things that makes us good at giving realistic projections is that we have actually done this stuff ourselves. I was personally in design build for twenty-plus years, so there is not much that I haven't done. However, one of the main things we do is train vendors how to do this work, and to do that I also have to train our own employees how.

Moving to Little Creek Farm

2008-03-29T17:45:00.000-07:00

For the last year and a half, Cogito has been residing in beautiful downtown Asheville. The location was chosen mainly because of the proximity to our clients, vendors, and other businesses that we interact with. However, with the growth of our clients regionally, and our technical advances internally, most of our physical meetings, document transfers, and printing needs have been replaced with our on-line project management and web conferencing software. Now most of our meetings are happening virtually or on-site.

These advances have eliminated hours of travel back and forth, having to be away from our job sites or office, and having to schedule whole days around one to two hour meetings. This is not only improving our service, but eliminates thousands of dollars in printing, shipping, and travel for us and our clients. It is also greatly reducing the environmental impact of these activities reducing the need for fuel and saving lots of trees.

Last December we were able to acquire a two acre piece of land that contains, two small streams, flat areas, as well as hill tops, and lots of native flora and fauna. This property was logged about fifteen years ago, so it also contains many exotic invasives, and is in a transitional state very similar to most of the properties we work on for our clients. We have started a trail system, and much of the forest restoration and exotic removal. We hope to use this as an educational tool for our employees and a demonstration tool for our clients.

We already have an organic ornamental and vegetable garden and are experimenting with many of the products and techniques that we recommend to our clients. Everything that we try to accomplish (horticulturally) with our clients, we are already doing at Little Creek Farm, so it only makes since that our offices should be here as well. Construction should begin on our new building in the next couple months, and we look forward to having you all out. We can think of no better way to help you grow the people that grow your places than letting you see how we grow our own.

Little Creek Farm is located on Bull Creek Road in the Riceville Community of Asheville. It is conveniently located fifteen minutes from downtown and fifteen minutes from Black Mountain.

Spring Annuals

2008-03-28T19:06:00.000-07:00

We put the first round of spring annuals out on one of our resort properties this week. Typically, we don't plant annuals in big blocks unless they are in prime spots around entrances, signs, or statues. Annuals can really take away from the natural beauty of a space if they are put out in the open, so we try to restrict them to areas where they can have more architectural impact, but still tell the story of the seasons as they are changed out.

We also try to make sure that we syncopate them. Nature doesn't plant in matching big blocks or sausages. If there are ten in one spot there should be several in other, a few a little farther over, and maybe even one where you don't suspect. The way the weight of the colors fade in and out can help guide you through the landscape from one point of impact into another theme or room and to the next point of impact. If trees and shrubs provide the beat to the song, flowers are more like the tone, and how they are used creates the melody, and when they conflict with each other or the landscape they can really screw up the pitch.

People often ask me the best place to plant flowers, and I usually reply wherever a weed might grow. I often find that someone will get far more pleasure out of a few pansies where there is a missing stone in the sidewalk, than they will from five hundred in a circle in the middle of the driveway. I try to plant my annuals as nature would its wildflowers, where ever there is enough bare ground, light, and moisture to make them grow. This helps sustain the space they are in. It keeps the weeds out by occupying the space, and eliminates some mulching by shading the ground.

Inherently annuals pose a sustainability problem in that they have to be replanted every year, or in most cases three times per year. We try to reduce this impact in a few ways. In the early spring and fall I try to throw in some lettuce or other ornamental greens where there might not be enough sun to grow something like that once the trees are fully leafed out. In the summer rotation I might replace that with a Hosta or Astilbe that would stay up until it freezes in the fall. Planting those perennials for later seasons eliminates two rotations of flowers, Those rotation average about six to eight dollars a square foot so this can really help move toward sustainability.

We also recognize that while the properties grow, so does the number of places that might like flowers, so we always try to replace some of our annual space with shrubs or perennials when we switch things out. While we want flowers everywhere, we don't want to overwhelm our selves or our clients with the overall amount they have to care for. Whenever possible we try to make sure that the plants do more to take care of the space that they are in than we do to take care of them. If it doesn't it is not a sustainable solution.

Introduction

2008-03-27T22:57:00.000-07:00

Cogito Landscape was created to help people navigate through the decisions, challenges, and rewards associated with sustainable development. Too often people think that because something is sustainable you don't have to do anything to sustain it. In reality the word sustainable implies that something needs sustained.

Sustainability is a condition of relation between the objects being sustained and the stewards responsible for them. Cogito Landscape is focused on residential and commercial landscapes, residential and resort developments, conservation properties and easements. All of these properties faces the same challenges when it comes to sustainability. There is no single answer to those challenges, the questions that must be asked to address them, or the consequences and rewards for the actions taken.

We created this blog to provide a place for people to discuss these questions in an open forum and to welcome the input of others. The mission of Cogito Landscape is to grow people that grow places. This includes the developers, builders, and design teams that create them, the contractors and vendors that build and maintain them, the salesmen that communicate them, and the end users that eventually become their stewards.

Sustainability is a symbiotic relationship in which all of these different parts play key parts and depend on each other to make it work. Cogito works to bring these people together, and give them the tools, information, and assistance they need to make this happen, and create a system that will survive the test of time. We hope this blog becomes one more point where this synergy can occur, not only with our clients, but with anyone who wants to grow and help us grow.