May Meeting: Food Forest Permaculture

Our speaker will be Mike Musialowski who will inform us on Food Forest Permaculture.  

Michael "Maciek" Musialowski has master’s degrees in chemistry and experiential education. He spent 1 1/2 years in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem living and breathing field-based environmental education.  He planted his orchard in Spring of 2013 in Taos, NM. Though initially self-taught, he finished a 72-hour Permaculture Design Course in 2018. He began hosting food forest tours in 2020, and soon after shifted from K-12 to focus on permaculture education. He founded the Food Forest Movement nonprofit in 2022. In addition, he is working on a food forest manual and a card curriculum aligning the climate-polycrisis with addictions. He is also an amateur passive-solar home designer.

His talk is entitled Food Forests are Perennial Polycultures that Yield Moisture Retention, Resilience, and Food.  Agroforestry systems compatible with high desert climate challenges utilize earthworks, mulching, fungal inoculation, perennial species selection, and dense arrangement. In a Taos-style food forest, rain runoff is minimized, windbreak is inherent, microbial populations are high which invite a vibrant food web, and biodiversity is very high. Such integrated approaches require initial planning and labor, but maintenance diminishes after 5-7 years. Permaculture is a useful framework that builds on ancient use of polycultures. 

Monthly Los Jardineros meetings are open to the public, so invite a friend who might be interested in permaculture, growing food intensive gardens or in joining Los Jardineros.