Jerome Ostentowski – Rocky Mountain Permaculture Guru

Business-Organization: Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute

A forager and permaculturist with roots in rural Nebraska, Jerome Osentowski lives in a passive solar home he built at 7200 feet above Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley. Director and founder of Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute and a permaculture designer for thirty years. Through his greenhouse design business Ecosystems Design, he has designed five greenhouses for himself and scores of others for private clients and public schools in the Rockies and beyond. His site hosts an intensively cultivated one acre of indoor and outdoor forest garden and plant nursery, which he uses as a backdrop for intensive permaculture and greenhouse design courses. Among his accomplishments is hosting the longest-running Permaculture Design Course in the world, now at thirty one years running. Jerome has also been instrumental in identifying, conserving, and propagating heritage fruit trees that have survived and borne crops for over a century in the harsh environment of the Roaring Fork Valley. Jerome’s explorations of sustainable systems and his travels for development projects have taken him to Baja, Nicaragua, Patagonia, Finland, Australia, and the Caribbean. Jerome’s recently published book, “The Forest Garden Greenhouse” chronicles his life’s work and details the integrated livelihood system he has cultivated including the greenhouses, forest garden, soil building practices, animal husbandry, and waste streams.

Basalt
United States

9709274158

Website: https://crmpi.org/

Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/crmpi/

Workshop(s)

Workshop 1: Indoor and Outdoor Forest Gardening

A forest garden is an edible ecosystem, a consciously designed community of mutually beneficial plants and animals intended for human food production. By bringing your food forest into a greenhouse, you are provided with food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizer, flowers, fungi, and medicine all year around! Master permaculturist Jerome Osentowski presented on indoor and outdoor forest gardening and his work at the 30-year-old high altitude permaculture demonstration site, The Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute in Basalt, Colorado, where he has 5 near-net-zero greenhouses. He will also discuss larger commercial projects he has worked on through his greenhouse and forest garden design company, Ecosystems Design Inc, to show how and why to build an indoor forest garden.