Come join us as Ron and Vicki Nowicki of Downers Grove, who help families re-connect with the natural world through ecologically sustainable landscape design, will present a program March 5th at 1:30pm on how you can transform your own yard using the methods of permaculture. Ron and Vicki weren’t caught up in appearances or styles. They simply wanted to design something based on principles that were modeled after the natural world and how it worked. Interestingly, Ron found himself borrowing from history to design an energy-efficient, passive solar home. He used a New England Salt Box design with an ice house roof for summer cooling, a central fireplace, a wood stove fed by wood gathered primarily from assorted landscape jobs, a huge rain barrel and of course a root cellar for moist cold storage to accommodate a good portion of their summer crops. With respect to the landscape, he and Vicki used evergreen windbreaks to conserve energy in the winter and deciduous shade trees to cool the house in the summer. They never used a single bit of mown lawn but filled their landscape with native plants, perennial food plants and a gigantic vegetable and herb garden. When they began to plant flowers to attract beneficial insects, birds and bats, they dubbed their entire site a gardenfarm. Who knew that 30 years later they would become the quintessential suburban permaculturists? Once a novelty, Circle GardenFarm is now able to supply an almost year-round bounty of “local”, organic food.
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