About

I grew up in New Hampshire and graduated from The University of New Hampshire in the late 1970’s with a Bachelor of Science degree from the Life Sciences and Agriculture Department. My major was Plant Science, general studies in horticulture and agriculture.

During and after college, I worked on the oldest family run farm in America, both outside in the fields and inside the large farm store. Outside, I spent a lot of my time working the fields with tractors, getting them ready for planting. I also spent a fair amount of time picking the crops after they matured. If you have never spent 8 hours stooped over in a field picking bush beans, you have not lived! Inside, I worked stocking and maintaining the produce and dry goods. One of the highlights of this employment was my regular excursion with the owner of the farm to the Boston Produce Market to supply the business with produce outside of what was in season in New Hampshire.

For several months after graduation, I drove a large truck delivering organic yogurt from the manufacturing plant in southern Maine to Boston. This was when organic food, and especially yogurt, was almost unknown. The company’s owners loved living in Maine, but their customers were almost exclusively health food stores, co-ops, and ethnic groceries in Boston. I still remember many of the delicious ethnic delicacies I was fed by the matriarchs of some of these businesses. They seemed to be eternally convinced that I was on the verge of starvation and needed to be fattened up. I recall times when one of the women would look me head to toe, say something to her husband in their native language, and then disappear into the back of the business. Even after I finished stocking the yogurt, I would be told by the husband that his well-being depended on my not leaving until his wife returned. Soon enough she would be back with a huge plate of homemade food. This was a great job!

About a year after graduation from UNH, I moved to San Francisco. There, I took several courses in the Horticulture Program at City College of San Francisco. For approximately 13 years, I worked in downtown San Francisco in a job completely unrelated to my studies, interests, or previous work experience. (I know, welcome to the club!) The work was intense and often interesting, providing an intellectual challenge, good compensation and travel. However, I always felt a bit out of sorts in the corporate environment, far from my rural New England roots, interests and education.

Eventually I left that job to work for a year or two in a tech start-up company. Unfortunately, although it was a good company run by a very smart guy, it was not one of the start-ups that went skyward with the dot com boom. By this time, I was married and we had our first daughter and two years later, a son. I started working closer to home, running a business managing rental properties and working for banks and investors doing residential and commercial property repair and renovations. When our 2nd daughter was born, we decided to move from the urban San Francisco Bay Area to Southern Oregon. For the past 12 years I have been a stay at home dad, homeschooling three children. My oldest daughter is now in college, my son graduates from high school this year, and the youngest is still a homeschooled middle school student getting ready for the transition to public high school. I will be re-entering the work-day world soon and hope to spend my time in a job much closer to my roots, education and early work experience.

Throughout all of this, I have continued to garden sustainably and organically. This started 25 years ago when I found dead ladybugs on plants in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.   That day I vowed I would never again use insecticides in my own garden. When I lived in San Francisco, I "farmed" the small back yard of the building, growing quite a few different vegetables even in the cool, foggy, San Francisco summers. When we moved over to the east side of the San Francisco Bay, I raised "crops" in many hundred square feet of raised beds. At our current home of almost 2 acres in Southern Oregon, I have grown so much organic produce that we am able to barter it for credit at the local farm stands. I try to cut back, but I must have the "farmer" gene if there is such a thing! Of course I have never lost my love of ornamental horticulture and landscaping, making each place I have lived into a bit of a horticultural oasis.

Although I was involved in a food co-op in college, my experience with organic food is mostly personal. As you may find from exploring this site, I feel strongly about organic, sustainable, farming methods.  I also promote sustainable, ethical, food production and distribution, believing that it is really a pretty simple concept that would benefit society by becoming more mainstream than it has been.

Simple is a word that if put into practice seems to make life much more enjoyable. This is easier said than done in our busy world, but maybe by providing ongoing information and dialog, this site will help all of us integrate some simple, healthy practices into our lives. With my posts, your comments and some guest writing, I hope to provide a resource for what I call "Common Sense" simple healthy living. If you would like to read a post with some other, information, take a look at Eight Facts About Myself.