Leandro “Nachie” Braga talks with young visitors at Preston’s Cave Spring about the ecosystem restoration work in progress there.
Leandro “Nachie” Braga founded Geomancer Permaculture in 2019 to further his work with plants, landscapes, woodlands, and water flows. Since then, he has worked on restorative projects with the Lexington Fayette Urban County Government and other organizations, such as Friends of Wolf Run, to improve urban ecosystems and mitigate stormwater management.
In 2022, Geomancer won the Kentucky Association for Environmental Education’s Outstanding Business in Environmental Education award and the Community Environmental Luminary award from the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection. Both awards recognized Geomancer’s impact on community education and Lexington’s urban environment. Braga also received the 2018 Lexington Environmental Award from the Lexington Environmental Commission for his stormwater mitigation and ecological restoration work at McConnell Springs Park. Braga was also recently appointed to Lexington’s Infill and Redevelopment Steering Committee.
We spoke with Braga about his work.
What is permaculture?
Permaculture is a combination of the words permanent and culture. It’s a system of thought and an international movement around how we can create permanent or sustainable cultures while not degrading … the land. How can we learn to be in balance with the rest of the nonhuman world by looking at the patterns and processes of nature? Those are the most important elements in any design, and it’s often the most energy-efficient way to do something.
What involvement do you have with stormwater mitigation in Lexington?
The EPA Consent Decree, in 2011, created the Water Quality Incentive Grant Program for the city of Lexington. All our water-quality fees go into a pool of money, some of which gets awarded as grants to projects that improve water quality in some way. It has enabled a swell of different stormwater projects all over town. I’m mainly focusing on things like tree plantings and education events to get people directly involved in managing riparian or streamside areas.
What are the land uses in an area? And how does it affect the site’s hydrology?
We want to assess that on a watershed- by-watershed basis. One of the main things we look at is tree canopy cover. We also look at what impervious surface areas there are, like parking lots and roofs that interrupt the natural water cycle by not letting the rainwater soak through.
There are only so many parking lots we can tear up to replace with a permeable surface, and a lot of the people who are interested in doing it have already done it over the past 10 years. We need to plant trees. But currently, the way the grants are written, you can’t get money to do large-scale tree planting.
I gave a presentation to the Water Quality Fees Board proposing that the same calculation used for scoring grants based on the square footage of parking lots be applied to the size of the canopy created by tree planting. We’d be linking a statutorily mandated utility bill … to a program for improvement in the urban tree canopy. That kind of leadership would be astonishing. [On February 16, the Lexington Water Quality Fees Board voted unanimously to approve Braga’s proposal, adding tree canopy incentives to both the Infrastructure and Neighborhood class grants.]
Please talk about your project in the Cardinal Valley area.
That’s the riparian food forest I’ve been working on for a couple of years. It will be the largest food forest in Kentucky that I know of. It will take at least five years for people to be able to look at it and say, ‘Oh, I get it.’
Most of the work so far has been administrative — getting grants, navigating utility easements and getting permits from the city to do the project. Right now, we’re removing invasive plants like honeysuckle. We’ll start planting in the spring.
Geomancer focuses on native food crops and medicinal plants — things that will benefit the surrounding neighborhood. By virtue of being native plants, they are adapted to the ecosystem we’re putting them in and repairing. They’ll also provide habitat benefits for local wildlife. It’s all one big circle. We want to support the pollinators and other beneficial insects, like spiders, that perform some of the most vital functions in the ecosystem and also perform essential services to a fruit production system. We will be planting various types of plums, persimmons, serviceberries, pawpaws, gooseberries, and other cane fruits, like raspberries and blackberries. There are plenty of black walnuts there already. We’ll also plant hickories, chinquapin chestnuts, and hazelnuts.
What type of projects have you worked on at McConnell Springs?
I started working in McConnell Springs in 2017. I’ve been fortunate to keep getting invited back.
The first stormwater project I managed and designed was around the Blue Hole Spring and funded by Lexington’s Community Environmental Academy. Overflows from adjacent industrial properties were coming into the park and eroding that historic artesian spring, dumping sediments and other things into the water. By building a large infiltration basin across from the spring and using the soil that we dug out of that basin to build a berm to shield the spring from the stormwater, we were able to mitigate that issue completely. We also planted several hundred perennials and 50 or more woody trees and shrubs. It created new habitat, and shortly after we finished that project was the first sighting of mink in McConnell Springs. It was hanging around that pool. We returned the following year and did an even larger planting of perennials and a greater diversity of woody plants on the other side of Blue Hole Spring.
Last year we excavated three new infiltration basins and a large plunge pool on the edge of McConnell Springs Park, where there continue to be issues with stormwater runoff from nearby industrial properties. We’ll be planting there in the spring. The McConnell Springs staff is great! They’ve been collecting seeds and propagating plants. We’re going to plant that area totally and the park won’t have to mow it anymore. It’s important to do these projects on public property. It has become an educational resource for field trips from schools and universities, and people can see the work and how it functions and learn how to do it on their lands.