DU putting in Permaculture Gardens

From a blog post, I found this: "Permaculture gardens are being put in around the DU campus as it is a dry environment. This is a long term plan."

He has posted a picture of the garden spot.

No mention of the garden being planted on the official DU website that I could find, but some minutes from spring 2009 showed that it was being discussed.

Photos from a 2008 Design Course

Here's photos from a Boulder, CO, 2008 design course, presented by The Permaculture Project. It's a nice set of photos to give you an idea of some of the activities that take place during a permaculture class.

Looks like the person behind that is Wayne Weismean, a teacher out of Illinois. He also has a nice permaculture blog.

CU Professor Talks About Limits

Permaculture is, in my mind, truly about acknowledging limits. Limits of energy, limits of ecosystems, and limits of technology. We can use design to increase food production, decrease work and energy, but fundamentally, we're accepting that we need to use less than what the sun provides and work around that.

The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia has a nice post on 'The Mathematics that Contemporary Economics Ignores' which is worth reading.

I'm posting it on this blog because it also features 8 10 minute embedded videos featuring CU Professor Dr. Albert Bartlett on the limits of growth in a finite system. Well worth the watch.

Denver Permaculture Classes this fall

The folks at Wild Green Yonder, announced a slew of permaculture courses. These include

Intro to Permaculture, Urban Permaculture, Permaculture for Renters, and Obscure Edibles for the Colorado Climate.

For more information, including pricing, visit their classes page.

Edible Schoolyard/Farm School started in Carbondale

Jerome Ostenkowski, of CRMPI, is helping the Carbondale high school provide an agricultural educational opportunity to students.

From the Aspen Post:

Jerome Osentowski, Colorado Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute (CRMPI) operator and 25 year veteran of alternative gardening practices, came up with the idea for a CSA Farm School when he, Jennifer Craig of Ute City Farm and Ken Kuhns of Peach Valley CSA partnered with Fat City Farmers to form Aspen Homegrown which provided training to ten students last year. “I was thinking, how do we train more CSA farmers for high altitude gardening?” said Jerome speaking on the genesis of the project, “Why not create an official school that would train 20 students a year?” That began his quest to find a permanent location for the project.

More information in the full article.

Article about Ward, CO, in the Permaculture Activist

Sandy Cruz, who runs the High Altitude Permaculture Institute, has an article, "Re-Envisioning and Restoring Wild Lands in the Rocky Mountains", in the latest Permaculture Activist. This issue, number 73, focuses on bioregionalism. Sandy discusses efforts, hers and others, to preserve wilderness around Ward, Colorado, where she lives.

My favorite part of the article is her dicussion of interactions with government agencies. As you can imagine, preserving wilderness requires extensive involvement with federal, county and city governments, as well as quasi-governmental agencies like Great Outdoors Colorado. It was interesting to read about such intricacies, as well as her success.

If you are interested in permaculture, and haven't checked out the Permaculture Activist, please do so. They have a website, but the magazine is the way to go. Check with your library--I know Boulder has a subscription.

Database of useful plant species for the Denver region

Via the Wild Green Yonder, I found this google spreadsheet with over 100 plants well suited to the Denver area. The author explains:

...a wealth of information exists in print and online for researching and selecting guilds – check out Plants For a Future and the University of Minnesota’s nursery database for starters. Still, this species information is spread across several websites, it’s difficult to sort through, and it’s rarely specific to the climate you’re in. As a result, guild building isn’t always as user-friendly as it ought to be.

In response to this challenge, I’ve begun the Atriplex Project – an attempt to create a comprehensive open-source database of useful plant species for Denver’s bioregion of the shortgrass steppe. Its current incarnation is a google spreadsheet that anyone can edit and export, although down the line it would be great to develop it into a more user-friendly standalone website.

What a great idea! This type of open information exchange is just what the internet is great for, and it looks like the author is happy to have other people help.

A side note about Plants for a Future--I wanted access to a sample of their database a month or so ago, and wrote them email, but they didn't seem too responsive. Based on the home page note:

The Plants For A Future charitable company has a new management team, and we are working on plans to redevelop the Plants For A Future website and database. Some of the information on this website about the organisation is out-of-date and misleading. The database continues to be available from this site.

and the blog entries, it seemed that they're going through changes right now. But the data is still good!