I Will Try Organic For a Healthy Lifestyle, and a Five Year Old Boy

I was motivated to change my lifestyle when my doctor told me I had failed my stress test. Prior to that news I had never heard of a stress test. The angioplasty and other medical proceedures came first, and then the lifestyle changes.

Raw food, exercise, time with the kids. Out with the sugar, the frying pan the saturated fats, the stress. and, in with

growing more of my own food - organic food. The kids do all the work in the garden and I will sit and watch from the garden bench. Maybe!. It didn't quite work out that way, but together we did produce a fair amount of fresh fruits and vegetables without the use of harmful fertilizers or weed sprays.

Kids are not really that good at digging, most of the hardest work falls to me. It's good to dig with a shovel, pull weeds, make compost. I should be happy to get the extra exercise. and it does’nt do kids any harm to watch an old guy with a heart condition slaving away in the garden.

After all, I was part of the generation that did all the damage to the planet, so I should be happy to pay back and show an example to the kiddies!

I was reminded that Rachel Carson had it right in her book "Silent Spring" when she observed that the world was sliding towards a chemical and pollution related disaster.

She also said

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscover with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."

So, teaching the kids some planet friendly, ecologically beneficial and physically challenging stuff can't do any harm. Better late than never!

It's amazing how kids catch on. They know there is some sort of problem. After all their older relatives are dying from cancer and heart disease, and the schools are teaching them about global warming, and greening the planet. So why not a little home work in the backyard growing some food without chemicals.

You sow a little seed and it grows into this gigantic plant, out onto the lawn with literally dozens of cucumbers attached to it as if by magic.

"What are we going to do with all these cucumbers, Grandpa?" "You take them to the house" Grandpa replies, "where your mother will put some up for winter. She will bring the rest back to the compost bin where they will become more soil in which we will grow more cucumbers next year.

You my boy are part of the circle of life - the big picture." And the potatoes! What's magic about sticking a few cut up potatoes in the soil and later digging buckets full of new potatoes. To a child it is magic! "What!" "We get all these potatoes from a few halves; unbelievable!"

When I was a child on a good sized cattle and sheep farm in the north of England we didn't use inorganic fertilizers, or herbicides and weed spray, just sheep and cattle manure heaped and composted for a couple of years, "to get the bacteria working." The heat killed the weed seeds.

Yes! The kitchen garden was big, very big. Nobody used stuff out of a bag to make things grow, and they certainly did not buy their vegetables in a supermarket!

Later, we modernized and we used things like sheep dip, which did nothing for the health of the hired help, and very little for the health of the sheep. Later, the government banned the use of sheep dip because it contained DDT. The use of other farm chemicals came later when we were trying hard to compete, by using these 'modern' farming methods.

I left the farm when I was old enough and joined the air force. Later, I went to the local university where I studied agricultural economics. Spreading inorganic products onto our food supply might be bad and could cause a disaster for human kind, but it was good economics. People didn't get it then, but they get it now!

Ironically one of my profs. was the man who had a lot to do with developing selective weed killers like 24D. We thought he was a genius. This was in the late 50's and 1960's.

I also became editor of a farm magazine, and publisher of a country magazine, and became a full time farmer in Canada, where I live to this very day.

I spent many years spreading the bad stuff; a little ammonium phosphate here a little round-up, atrazine, and the urea, not to mention the other herbicides and insecticides. There is nothing really good about spreading poison across the land and contributing to chemical and pollution lifestyle related diseases; degenerative diseases.

Feeding dead animals to live animals can hardly be called responsible. I can remember feeding ground up chicken bones and feathers to dairy cows; it was considered an economically viable thing to do. What a concept!

Farmers and everybody else in society have been throwing chemical rubbish around for years. I should know, I did my bit.

My generation, also knew that eating fat causes plugged arteries but thought it didn't matter. We were busy making a living and we were the moral majority. Everybody else was well - nuts!

Today we have toxic pathogens in our food, and e-coli or other deadly bacteria in our water, and we also have (GE) Genetically Modified crops. Messing with the gene pool can provide benefits for sure, but combining genetics with lethal chemicals might come back to haunt us.

Is it any wonder then, that more people are growing their own food in their backyards or buying certified organic food in their supermarket?

As a result of my generations mistakes, consumers are now demanding chemical free products in their supermarkets. Imagine that!

Robert Robson Website Publisher and Editor

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