My Journey
Ever since I can remember I loved being outside in nature; digging in the dirt playing in the water and exploring all the plants, bugs, and creatures. My mother tells me my first emergency trip to the doctor was because she found me eating ants in the grass – the doctor said; “some people coat them with chocolate and consider it a delicacy”.
I couldn’t resist exploring everything, so I had quite a few more trips to emergency or calls from distant neighbors that I had wandered off, sorry Mom for all the stress. My siblings think I have exceeded the 9 lives limit, so I am trying to be more cautious now. That’s not really always happening; so you’ll get to learn from my mistakes so you won’t have to use up your lives!
My father showed me how to build things and fix almost everything around the home. I learned gardening, woodworking, what a drill bit was, and many other things probably while I still spent some time on all fours. I soon as I could stand and actually do things for them, I promptly slammed my thumb in the front door and to this day have a distorted double thumbnail on my left thumb.
My grandfather introduced me to wild remote places in the mountains where you could swim in a river and eat apples right off the trees and walk for hours without seeing another person. He also showed me how to use a chainsaw and mower when I was still barely tall enough to reach the handles. (Luckily for my mom she didn’t have to see any of that.)
My Grandmothers (Clark and Bailey) and Mom helped me appreciate food, exotic places and I learned a little about cooking. My Grandmother Bailey taught me how to make chocolates and butter-creams and fried chicken among others. The butter creams will 50 some years later become Mr CBD butter creams as I begin to produce hemp derived products on the farm!
Sometime close to reaching double digit ages I began to grow things, dig up the back yard for a vegetable patch and follow the little newsprint monochrome magazine “Organic Gardening” by Robert Rodale. It was then I decided to be a farmer. I also started selling seeds door to door in my neighborhood to pay for the magazine.
As I got older my skills for innovation as well as finding limits and breaking things led to a successful career as an engineer designing testing and redesigning numerous circuits, machines, and systems to survive their environment and to be robust, reliable, and affordable. That’s come in pretty handy as I have built my farm and business with reclaimed, reused, and repurposed pieces on the proverbial shoestring. Or more accurately by selling lettuce (Arugula) produced for pennies on the dollar of what it would have cost if I bought all new ready-to-go systems. You can still get our greens, micro-greens, herbs and products at https://1-877-ARUGULA.com our online store for Planet Earth Diversified which I founded in 1975. The business license office laughed at the name then; but, we all seem to be a little more socially Green these days.
