These are tools that will greatly enhance the success of your design to the degree that you use them. Take the time to fill out the client interview; it will help ensure you create a design that is both realistic and ideal for you. You may want to review your answers towards the end of the course before you complete your design. Have any of them changed? Do you have things you want to add?
This interview makes a great feedback form - look at it a year from now, and in five years, and see how much you’ve accomplished!
The Site assessment is a guide that helps you get to know your piece of land. It is mostly focused on the pattern language of your land (climate, weather, water, geology, ecosystem), and that’s what you should focus on first, especially if your time is limited.
The Site Assessment Resources document provides some basic links for you to use for your own site assessment. These internet tools are regularly updated and some become unavailable. We can’t guarantee these links will always work or that they are the best links. Most were chosen for ease of use, but some of these tools aren’t easy to use for people who aren’t familiar with them. Don’t hesitate to ask questions about any of these points!
We’ve included a sample site assessment we did for our farm. This has many links that provide data for the state of Florida or the US in some cases, that you can use on your property. We will discuss the value of these points in various sections of the course and share more info about how to determine some of these points.