Articles about or by Oakhaven
"Design for the Five Kingdoms:
ZERI Principles and Methods"
REMEMBER THE EXCITEMENT, the feeling of overwhelming possibilities arising from your first permaculture design course, or your first exposure to the powerful ideas of permaculture? Finding an approach that brought together disciplines and ideas that had been careening around in our brains was incredibly powerful, both frightening and empowering. Since those days the practice of permaculture ideas and ideals has been a daily part of our lives. In the spring of 2005 a similar experience unfolded with our introduction to the concepts of Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI).
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http://www.permacultureactivist.net/
WITH THE INCREASING INTEREST in biodiesel as an alternative to petrodiesel, many have looked at the possibility of growing more oilseed crops as a solution to the problem of peak oil. There are two problems with this approach: first, growing more oilseed crops would displace the food crops grown to feed mankind. Second, traditional oilseed crops are not the most productive or efficient source of vegetable oil. Micro-algae is, by a factor of 8 to 25 for palm oil. and a factor of 40 to 120 for rapeseed, the highest potential energy yield temperate vegetable oil crop. Michael Briggs at the...
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Remember that day in kindergarten when you heard the story of the shepherd whose pouch of milk magically turned to cheese? According to the folk tale, the shepherd usually filled his cow-stomach skin with drinking water. One morning he filled it with milk. When he stopped hours later to drink from the vessel, he found curds and whey, the result of heat and agitation created during the day’s hike.
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Oakhaven Permaculture Center, in Southwestern Colorado's LaPlata County, will host "Swadeshi on the Green: A Festival of Local Self-Sufficiency," Sunday, July 11th. Planned as an annual celebration of local culture and production, the event will feature food and music, but the real focus will be a series of workshops to help people learn how to keep bees; make beer, bread, cheese, candles and soap; convert from diesel to bio-diesel; find native herbs, install wind or solar power; and spin and weave wool. Carried into practice and into livelihoods, all these activities would eventually allow area residents to become much less dependent on the U.S. and global economies.
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"...The Animas Valley Bioneers of the Year are:
. . .
•Tom Riesing and Christie Berven, of Oakhaven: A Permaculture Center, a La Plata Canyon farm and education center that focuses on encouraging sustainable growing practices and self-sufficiency."...
Oakhaven Permaculture Center founders walk their talk
HESPERUS - If the unthinkable occurs - be it due to Mother Nature or man - and the trucks carrying our food supply no longer roll, would residents of La Plata County be able to sustain themselves? Tom Riesing and Christie Berven could, and quite nicely.
Cohabitating with the natural environment on 35 acres in La Plata Canyon, Riesing and Berven have created Oakhaven: a Permaculture Center, an oasis that is at once productive, ecologically beneficial, financially profitable and beautiful.
HESPERUS If there is order in chaos, then the gardens at the Oakhaven Permaculture Center may serve as an example.
These gardens have no neat rows, and the soil is covered with mulch. The gardens appear to be planted randomly with trees and shrubs, vegetables and herbs growing together in the same space. But beyond the chaotic appearance is an order that allows the plants to live in harmony and help each prosper.
In other times and places, Tom Riesing crunched numbers on Wall Street, and Christie Berven taught elementary school. Since meeting in 1998, the two have been born again and are zealots for their cause: soil, earthworms, beet greens. Tom and Christie are the creators of Oakhaven Permaculture Center, tucked into the gamble oak and lichen-covered rocks at 8,700 feet off La Plata Canyon Road. The center consists of a 2,200-square-foot greenhouse, outdoor gardens, ponds, chickens and the ever watchful, astonished gazes of its creators.
Christie Berven is high energy, exuberance and fire. She pins you with her eyes, talking so fast you hope she remembers to breathe. If she is fire, Tom is stone, quarried from a deep, still place in the earth. His movements are slow and calculated, as are the thoughts he expresses. At the ages of 56 and 65, respectively, Christie and Tom are starting a new sort of family, and certainly a new sort of life.