This episode of the Ground Shots Podcast is with Wind Clearwater, a horticulturist and permaculturist who lives near Hotchkiss, Colorado.
For over 30 years, Wind Clearwater has been dabbling in horticulture, permaculture and landscape design. For the past 20 years, he has expanded his knowledge of these arts alongside skills like natural building, while living off grid in western Colorado at the Oasis. The Oasis is a land project that Wind has stewarded during this time where he has tended the ‘Forest Garden,’ a successful dry-land food forest over two decades. He propagates native and edible nursery stock for the Oasis Nursery, which sells desert adapted plants in the region. When he’s not working with plants he finds joy playing music, creating art, raising children, growing and learning.
We recorded this conversation in the heart of last summer on a hot day before monsoon season, though we didn’t end up getting much monsoon rain last season and are gearing up for a dry summer again this year. We start this conversation informally in Wind’s earthen home, and then we go on a land and garden tour for the rest of the conversation. There are chicken, water, wind, bug. bird and fly sounds - so be aware this this episode is very auditorily full! There is a little wind interference in a few moment but we tried to cut that down in audio editing as best we could.
In this episode of the podcast, we talk about:
permaculture in the desert
how the adobes in western-central Colorado used to be a grassland before settler abuse (overgrazing sheep and mis-use of water)
Lots of nerdy dry-loving plant talk!
Gardening from the heart and not the head
The strength of taking it very slow when doing permaculture in the desert
Humans as appropriate disrupters on the landscape and that responsibility
We do a tour of the Forest Garden and note our observations
Wind discusses his perspective on invasion biology and permaculture
intentional community and opening the land into a new incarnation
