Jerome Osentowski plucks a ripe fig from a branch and hands it to me. I peel it open and smear the sweet, pulpy mass in my mouth. It’s a sensual experience, made even more decadent because of where I’m standing. This fig tree is growing at 7,200 feet in the Rockies. The Mediterranean is nowhere in view, but falling snow is.“We have four months of fig season here. It’s incredible,” says Osentowski, winding his way through one of four greenhouses he maintains at his Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute. The alternative agriculture demonstration center, perched on the flanks of Basalt Mountain, could revolutionize the way we think about eating locally.
Outside, the institute is a marvel. During a visit in the fall, it’s a lush orchard of apples, apricots, pears and plums, all poised amid piñon and juniper trees that cling to the loose, desertlike soil. Inside, the institute’s greenhouses open into another world that pushes the boundaries of local food.
Pineapples grown in Colorado? Papayas? Bananas?
“We can have it all,” says Osentowski, talking with the fervor of a permaculture evangelist. “We can have all the local stuff that grows outside, and we can have all the stuff that grows anywhere else in the world right here.”
For 23 years, Osentowski has run his permaculture institute and “forest garden” 3 winding miles above Basalt, where he has converted 5 acres of red dirt into an edible oasis. The notion of permaculture takes organic farming to a higher level, turning a garden into an ecosystem. Short plants provide ground cover. Tall plants provide shade or a place for vines to climb. Some fix nitrogen in the soil. Some drive away pests. Some are home to beneficial insects. Instead of avoiding noxious pesticides and fertilizers, permaculture seeks to make them unnecessary.
“If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere,” said Osentowski, guiding me through a jungle of edible landscaping. “We started out with very little soil — probably no soil. You can see what it looks like on the hillside. Barren. If you can do it here without a lot of resources, then you can do it down on the bottomland and do it twice as fast.”
Adding alpine greenhouses to the mix takes the notion even further.
“Certainly in the mountain West, greenhouses are essential in achieving any measure of food security,” says Peter Bane, publisher of the monthly magazine The Permaculture Activist, and a regular instructor at Osentowski’s training center. “The climate here is harsh, and the growing seasons are still relatively short. As you can see from the greenhouses right in front of us here, it’s quite possible to create Mediterranean and even subtropical climates and have vegetables and fruits and all kinds of things all throughout the year.”
When Osentowski’s largest greenhouse burned down more than two years ago (it was, ironically, named Pele, after the Hawaiian fire goddess), Osentowski lost his biggest collection of tropical plants. With a lot of volunteer labor, a bunch of scrap material and plenty of his own resources, he’s rebuilt it bigger and better to be a showcase of tropical, Mediterranean and desert species.
If outside, his property is a Garden of Eden inside the new greenhouse, appropriately named Phoenix, it’s an “ark,” Osentowski says. “This has everything you need. It’s like I’m Noah. This is the ark, and we’ve got work to do. This is the salvation of how we need to live.”
Most of the permaculture institute’s greenhouses do the ordinary work of greenhouses. They push the boundaries of the season, growing fresh summer produce into December when the ground outside is frozen. But Phoenix pushes the boundaries of imagination, growing some of the world’s lushest produce in a frigid Rocky Mountain winter.
“If you can build a greenhouse and bring those plants here, thenyou don’t have to transport them on a jetliner from Chile,” Osentowski says. “You can grow them right here. Like the figs. Four months of figs!”
Phoenix is no ordinary greenhouse. Paths wind among terraced planting beds that will host plants from floor to ceiling. Imagine pineapples growing on the ground, coffee trees above them, bananas and mangos shading the coffee, passion fruit and kiwi vines branching overtop.
Rock bedding walls collect the daytime heat and release it at night. Instead of energy-intensive propane heaters, Phoenix uses a geoexchange system that in summer sucks the heat out of the greenhouse and stores it in the cooler ground below; come winter, the process is reversed, with the warmer underground air getting released into the greenhouse. That keeps the plants from getting too hot on summer days and the roots from getting too cold on winter nights.
A sauna sits on the side, offering a spot for students in Osentowski’s permaculture classes to relax. Keeping with the principles of permaculture, it also serves the extra purpose of generating greenhouse heat. A loft overhead will offer a tropical night’s sleep in the Rockies. A hammock slung over a cozy corner called Pebble Beach will offer a little lounge space. For Osentowski, a greenhouse can be about more than just food. It can create an outdoor living space inside.
Not everyone has such grandiose ideas about their greenhouses, though. But they don’t have to, he says. For most gardeners, a simple greenhouse that just adds a couple months to the growing season is plenty.
“You’re still eating tomatoes in December,” he says. “That’s long enough for most people.”
His institute is taking that message into the community with a pair of edible schoolyard projects inspired by the work of veteran Slow Food guru Alice Waters and her Chez Panisse Foundation. At Yampah Mountain High School in Glenwood Springs, students have completed a 22-foot dome greenhouse to serve as a space for agriculture classes and to grow food for school lunches that are healthier than mac and cheese.
At Roaring Fork High School in Carbondale, Osentowski is planning a 1-acre farm and a 42-foot dome greenhouse. Plans are under way for similar projects at the Basalt and Aspen elementary schools.
As the idea of growing your own food catches on, Osentowski says, greenhouses like these will need to be a part of the movement, at least in cold-weather places like the Rockies, where growing seasons are barely long enough to ripen a tomato.
If a greenhouse can grow papayas and passion fruit, too, so much the better.
