When we began this work two years ago, the south-facing hillside at Landwell was an impenetrable wall of Himalayan blackberry - a slope none of us had ever walked across, dense enough to hide an entire vehicle buried underneath (as we discovered later). Today, this same hillside hosts a lush cover cropped garden and our community gathers there to garden. This transformation is what two rounds of Ma Earth funding made possible.

See the video of our completed work here.

Landwell sits on 22 acres in the Jonive Creek valley in Sonoma County, California. We share the land with the Beehive Learning Center (a K-8 school nestled in the valley), with the families of the Landwell housing cooperative, and with our friend Jonathan Gay of Freestone Ranch down the road - a wetland restorationist whose excavator and track loader have shaped most of our earthwork. We also share it with foxes, quail, frogs, and, as of this this spring, the first wild ducklings many long time residents here can remember seeing raised in the valley.

Historically, this valley was once a braided wetland system connected to Jonive Creek and supporting steelhead trout habitat. In the 1950s, the Army Corps of Engineers channelized the Creek to support agriculture on the floodplain. As the creek was confined, off-channel habitat, including the trout, disappeared, seasonal wetlands dried, and the water table dropped.

Ma Earth Round One funded the clearing - blackberry, about 50 eucalyptus, and the first basins above and below the hillside. Round Two funded the building: contour terraces packed with trench-composted brush and pruned limbs, soil amended with compost and manure from our community, cover crops planted, straw laid down. What had been bare dirt is now a lush hillside garden where Landwell residents and neighbors gather for regular land workdays.

The results are already tangible. For the first time in 2025, and again in 2026, we have not pumped a single gallon of well water to keep the upper pond full year-round. The frog chorus is louder than any of us can remember. And this past April, a mama duck raised a clutch of wild ducklings on the pond just outside the third grade classroom - swimming through the wild parrot feather while we watched.

In Round Three, we bring the restoration work directly to Jonive Creek and the valley floor. With Jon’s equipment and our growing community, we will expand the existing pond and basin network along the creek to spread water back across the floodplain. Riparian biomass cleared during the work will be repurposed into hugelkultur mounds rather than chipped or burned, creating additional soil-building and water-holding structures. We will connect the creek to a new handicap-accessible valley garden, so the same restored water table that fills our pond can grow food anyone can reach.

Watch Jon and Max as they discuss the work that will be done in Round 3 here.

Round Three also opens a new collaboration and expands the human ecology of this project. We are partnering with NBOP, a grassroots immigration support network. Landwell is a rural project; NBOP serves urban immigrant families. We are opening this valley to them as a meeting space, a celebration space, and a growing space - pairing land restoration with social restoration.

Our long-term vision is the restoration of a functioning wetland ecosystem in the Jonive Creek Valley. We measure success by what returns: water held later into the dry season, songs in the trees, ducklings on the pond, neighbors on the land. River otters first. And eventually, steelhead trout, which have not found home here since the creek was dredged. Round Three is the next clear step on a long arc - and the first time our restoration work meets the creek directly.\