A 2nd Intro or How I got Started Growing My Own Food

There was interest expressed about my story and how I came to be doing what I am now. So here goes..

I grew up on a “gentleman’s farm” in the upper Pioneer Valley on the VT/Mass line. We had horses, bantam chickens, dogs and cats. I was raised on raw milk and meals cooked from scratch.

We were sent out to play all the time, roaming the fields and woods at will. I loved horses and reading. I had bouts of serious illness and odd symptoms even back then. I never could run as much as I wanted to and had poor stamina.

I moved out on my own in my late teens and it was 20 years before I drank raw milk again. I was a vegetarian from my late teens into my early 20’s but stopped eating that way when I wasn’t getting enough protein.

In the mid 1970’s my parents moved to CT, about 30 miles from Lyme, CT. I went down to visit them on the farm and a couple weeks later in September I was hospitalized for 5 days with “flu”. Shortly after my 20th birthday I started having cognitive problems. I couldn’t remember things, was having trouble thinking.

Over the next decade I worked as I could, often leaving jobs because I felt I couldn’t do them any longer, either physically or mentally or both (never was fired). In 1983 we bought our farm and set about building our house and the infrastructure. We were going to run a horse boarding stable and do lessons.

I’d continue to have bouts of “flu”, some of which probably were. But my physical health was slowly deteriorating as was my memory. More odd symptoms appeared.

I had a son in 1991 and had started problems with carb addiction while pregnant. It got so bad they wanted to put me on Prozac. I was adamant I wanted to fix what was wrong, not put a patch on it. I pursued looking at food as an alternative, starting with the book Beyond Prozac, which lead me to the Zone diet. These helped some, but there was clearly something missing.

In 1994, overnight, I became 100% lactose intolerant. Horrible pain if I ate anything dairy. I reacted to things like calcium lactate, which I tried to take to replace missing calcium. As the years went by I had more and more foods I could not tolerate: wheat, apples, lamb, most oils, nightshades.

In September 1999 I became very ill, sleeping 18 hours a day, unable to stand for very long. I lost the ability to run, then to walk far. There was no firm diagnosis. I was gifted a wheelchair in 2000 and used it if I left the house. The cognitive problems worsened greatly.

In 2001 I found the Radiant Recovery program and started that. It utilized sufficient protein, whole grain carbs, no sweeteners of any kind, low glycemic fruits, and lots of vegetables. It helped a good deal but there was still something important missing. We closed the boarding stable in October, both too ill to run it any longer. The farm lay fallow.

I had tried to keep up the vegetable gardens but they became too much for me and I closed the big one, turned it back to lawn. The last year I was able to do all my gardens was the summer of 1999, before I got really sick.

By this time I was eating strictly on the Radiant Recovery program but all the food was coming from the grocery store. We were living on a single disability income and never bought organic unless the item was only found that way.

I continued to get sicker and sicker, starting with paralysis episodes lasting for hours in 2004. These were never diagnosed as to what they were or what caused them. I started losing the use of my hands and my legs got worse. I had put on a lot of weight since 1991 and then suddenly lost it in 2006.

In 2007 I was on a homeschool forum as I had always homeschooled my son. There was a woman on the forum, one of those super researcher types. She had a son with autism and she was treating him with nutrition. She was posting the research she found so others could use it.

She started in October 2007 really hammering at me to try to improve the quality of the food I was eating, but I just didn’t feel we could afford it.
Finally she said, “Okay, just try 1 thing, just 1.”
“Ok”, I said, “What?”
“Raw goat’s milk kefir” she said.

Now remember, I had been 100% lactose intolerant for over 13 years, experiencing excruciating pain anytime I ingested dairy. I had passed out from the pain in the past. And here she was, urging me to eat something I was not sure I’d survive.

But she kept after me, month after month. Finally in January 2008 I agreed. So I had to find goat milk, in January, in New England. Not happening, they were all dried off for kidding.

Ok, she said, Jersey milk. So I searched and found a raw Jersey milk dairy near me. Next I had to locate a kefir grain. She suggested finding a Weston A. Price chapter leader near me. So I did and he gave me a beautiful healthy kefir grain, one I have to this day.

I cleared a whole week for this because, I sort of joked, I was going to die and there was the funeral…. I was scared to death.

She said to try the first minute dose of ¼ tsp after my biggest meal of the day. That was supper so that’s what I did. And I waited, and nothing happened. And in that moment, (here come the goosebumps - happens every time I tell this story) I knew some big change had happened.

Because by this time, whenever I ate anything, my gut erupted: bloating, gas, pain, etc. And this time, NOTHING had happened. So she said, next meal double it. So for breakfast, ½ tsp. Again NOTHING. She said each meal, double it. Always nothing.

I eventually was drinking ½ cup with each meal. Slowly over the next weeks, I started to improve. I could walk short distances, my head was clearer, some of the symptoms abated.

It became crystal clear that if I wanted any sort of a life, I was going to have to find the very best food I could. But I could not afford to buy it. About this time we had a small amount of money come in and we decided to try growing as much of our own food as we could.

Then in July 2008 I had horrific pain in my right hip area. I was in the ER 3 consecutive nights and finally one of the doctors noticed an irregular red area on my upper leg. She ordered Lyme testing. I was lucky this time, I was within the window of time after a bite and tested positive to ELISA, and then to the Western Blot. I had been repeatedly tested over the years and always negative. I made an appointment with a local Infectious Disease doctor and got in to see her in October.

She had requested as complete a medical history as I could generate. As she read over it, she would point to episodes and say here, here, here as possible re-infections since I was a child. I tested negative to co-infectons. So my Lyme history dated back decades, untreated.

By this time, I was well on my way to improved health using food. She wanted to try antibiotics, so I did several courses over 18 months, none of which had any effect at all. By the end of that, I had had so much improvement just doing the food, I discontinued any other treatment. As most of the symptoms are neurological, the chances of improvement are very slim.

That started my odyssey, since January 2008, to know as much as I could about food, nutrition, and growing my own. I share what I know in the hopes that someone else can have better health.

My main goal is to restore our soil, the 7th best in the world per National Geographic survey, to a balanced healthy state. Anything we raise on it will therefore also be healthy and nutrient dense. I’ve been working on this since 2010 when I first learn about it from Dan Kitteredge of the Bionutrient Food Association.

I’ve gone from housebound, using a wheelchair if I left the house, long periods of paralysis, unable to walk 100 yards, exhaustion, severe cognitive dysfunction, and pain to being able to work, on some days, for 4-6 hrs. I can now walk a mile, have not used the wheelchair since March 2008 (gave it way to a boy wanting to go to community college 3 years ago), and regularly help take care of the animals. I also re-dug and planted the big garden in addition to the little garden.

In 2016 I created a new 50’ x 37’ herb garden, plus cleaned out, planted, and maintained all the other 37 gardens and the 2 veg gardens. This is the first time since 1999 that this has happened. Clearly I found the missing piece I had been searching for since 1994.

I teach whenever and wherever there’s anyone who wants to learn. Someone took a lot of time with me, and now I am paying it forward, in hopes others can have a happy, healthier life.

For me, having high quality food has given me back my life.

References:

http://bionutrient.org/site/

https://www.westonaprice.org/