The Forest Garden Greenhouse

For roughly 200 years, greenhouses have been a mainstay of the market garden and nursery trades. But the possibilities of these indoor gardens to transform our homes and our lives remain largely unrealized.

In this groundbreaking book, Jerome Osentowski, one of North America s most accomplished permaculture designers, shows how to bring a forest garden indoors, even on unlikely terrain and in cold climates, using near-net-zero technology.

The Forest Garden Greenhouse advocates a unique approach to indoor agriculture using permaculture design concepts that take season extension into new and important territory, whether you re growing food or medicinals for your family or commercially.

Osentowski, director and founder of Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute (CRMPI), farms at 7200 feet on a steep, rocky hillside in Colorado. At this mountaintop site, Osentowski (along with architect and design partner Michael Thompson) has been designing and building revolutionary greenhouses that utilize passive and active solar heat storage technologies via what they call the climate battery. This cutting-edge, subterranean air-circulation system pushes hot, moist, ambient air from the greenhouse during the day through a network of buried perforated tubes, storing heat and humidity in the soil, to be retrieved again during cold nights. This remarkable technology creates tropical and Mediterranean climates at high altitudes and in cold climates (and everywhere else).

In addition to learning how to create their own climate battery, readers will receive in-depth information about:

The fundamentals of design and construction of greenhouses of various sizes;

Capturing energy and ventilation;

Bed-layout and soil-building techniques;

The secrets of successful companion planting;

The use of microclimates within and around the greenhouse, and more.

The book includes case studies of the greenhouses in operation at CRMPI designed specifically for the do-it-yourself builder as well as other studies that highlight larger and more ambitious greenhouses built on the same principles.

Whether your goal is simply to extend the growing season by a few weeks or to build a year-round tropical greenhouse, this book s detailed drawings, photos, and profiles of successful greenhouse projects on all scales will fundamentally change the conversation about growing food indoors."