Growing a Green Business

by Erin Rose

Imagine walking into your own warm, lush oxygen-rich greenhouse, picking fresh organic food, ready to eat, while outside it's the depths of winter! Though the growing season in Colorado is as short as 90 days, many are discovering that we can grow food all year round in a dome shaped greenhouse, made by Growing Spaces, a Pagosa Springs based company. The Growing Dome, developed by Udgar Parsons, is a high tech solar-powered greenhouse that sustains year-round growth even in the challenging winters of the Rocky Mountains. Growing Spaces has developed features that ordinary greenhouses do not have, such as heating and cooling with water, air, earth and the power of the sun.

In the early ‘70s Udgar Parsons, a Dentist and Orthodontist, made a career change and moved his family to a remote and beautiful place called Scoraig on the northwest coast of Scotland. There he pursued farming and practiced the art of self-sufficient living off the grid. A fascination with alternative life-styles that "care for the environment and our fellow humans," motivated Udgar and his family to participate in several alternative community experiments around the world.

The success of turning one overgrazed sheep ranch into a self-sufficient oasis led to his interest in cultivating food in challenging situations. In 1987 he co-founded a business called Bio-Spaces, based on the eight year Biodome research at Windstar, in Snowmass, Colorado, where he was the shop manager. Windstar’s founders, John Denver and Thomas Crum, were mentored by visionary, Buckminster Fuller in this work. Udgar felt that Bucky’s vision should benefit the world, so he created an affordable dome greenhouse in 1989.

Having built over five hundred dome greenhouses in 35 states, including Alaska and Hawaii, over the past ten years, Udgar is confident in his product. The domes serve backyard gardeners as "ecology labs," and are interdisciplinary learning tools for seven schools, and two Indian reservations. They provide medicinal plants and pharmaceuticals for the Blackfeet Community College in Montana, seed banks for the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in Carbondale, and a "living classroom" at Bayfield High’s "model for the nation." Students harvest herbs, vegetables and medicinal plants in their specimen gardens, and experiment with solar power, fish reproduction and plant hybrids in these living classrooms.

The Pagosa Springs area (Growing Spaces headquarters) will soon have more than 65 Growing Domes throughout the county with the most recent project by Mary K. Carpenter to provide State Certified organic herbs and greens to local consumers and restaurants, from her Rio Blanco Organic Farm. The year-round growing potential will save importing these greens from Texas and California.

Udgar’s socially responsible business models new ways of protecting our natural world, while raising awareness about energy-efficient products.

He is committed to creating "a new business culture, not just an economy. It is really about helping people learn about living and growing in harmony with the earth and its seasons. Involvement with nature as gardeners can raise the human spirit through studying the language of life as expressed in the seasons, and the plants themselves. Increasing awareness of the value of organic food for health make this an idea whose time has come."

For Udgar Parsons, small is beautiful, and the ongoing relationships with his clients are as important as selling the product. The strength of the dome itself is due to the interrelationships of all its parts, and the supportive network of satisfied customers sharing information makes this product an educational tool that will continue to benefit, long after it is purchased.

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Please send questions to: info@growingspaces.com / P.O. Box 5518 / 1868 B Majestic Dr. / Pagosa Springs, CO 81147
1-800-753-9333