Around Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, the legend is well-known: An eccentric old man living on Basalt Mountain had grown bananas at 7,200 feet. And from a patch of rocky hillside, perched precariously above a cliff, this gardening guru hadn’t only grown bananas; the lore suggested he’d brought to life all kinds of plants that seemed impossible to cultivate in the Rocky Mountains, including guavas, papayas, dragon fruit, grapes, figs, and passion fruit. A quick scan of Jerome Osentowski’s property suggests the stories surrounding his high-elevation green thumb aren’t fables. “We have about 10 different citruses,” Osentowski tells me one afternoon, gesturing toward a cluster of bright green fruits emerging from a tree branch.
It’s a hot July day, and the short, bespectacled 81-year-old with unkempt gray hair is ambling along a wooden-plank pathway that bisects one of his greenhouses, which has been constructed—with the help of contractors and volunteers—with scrap material, giving the whole compound a DIY, dystopian feel. In fact, the property relies only on solar power, and Osentowski sometimes compares himself to a survivalist. “We’re kind of the ultimate preppers here,” he says. “I look at this as a kind of ark—but Noah just had two of everything. We have 10 of everything.”
Osentowski is certainly right when it comes to plant life. Between his tropical- and Mediterranean-climate greenhouses and an outdoor food forest—where a cornucopia of fruit trees and herbs thrive—his property is a high-country Garden of Eden, teeming with so many plant species that his land may hold the largest diversity of edible species in all of Colorado. “Everything we have here has multiple yields,” Osentowski tells me. His eyes brighten while he demonstrates how one yield of a latticed vine is shading understory plants from direct sunlight. “And another of the yields is education,” he continues. “We have these plants here to
