Accidentally Green: Building an Organic Livelihood

By Gene R Stark and Melissa R Woods

Do you aspire to a sustainable lifestyle? If you are passionate about organic agriculture, this book is for you. Learn the true story of two teachers who will inspire you as they and their family build their organic growing business from the ground up. Lacking capital, experience, and encouragement, they learn the nuts and bolts of production an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flyover Country Publishing
• Release date: Mar 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781944788377

Gene R Stark

Gene Stark lives and writes in rural Minnesota. He has drawn his living and inspiration from the land and people of our great heartland. He enjoys many outdoor activities including organic gardening, fishing, hunting, and skiing. Learn more about Gene and his work at www.flyovercountryscribe.com.

Book preview

1. Formative Green

I learned it from my dad. He said, This morning we are going to rob some nests.

The first part of July, the time was right. I was young when I followed him out of the house the first time he showed me the trick. The dew was still on the grass and robins talked of missed rainstorms and lost opportunities in the world of worms. Finches still worked on their thistle-down nests and the quiet bubble of mid-summer rested heavily upon the blooming alfalfa and the suckling life that filled my young senses.

My dad had found a container in the cupboard. I remember the chipped edges of the white ceramic bowl and how he said if we could fill that bowl, we’d have a meal for our family. We walked to the edge of our garden and there, beneath green, moist foliage, found the morning’s quarry. We worked from the sides and outside edges of the nests, taking out some, careful not to disturb the others. I remember how I was impressed by their numbers. I marveled at how quickly we were able to fill the ceramic bowl.

When the bowl was full, we took them to the outside spigot. Dad said, We need to wash them before we give them to Mom for cooking. We gently rolled them in the water.

These will be the best you ever tasted, he smiled and we took our little trove into the kitchen.

These are nice, Mom commented as she took the bowl that Dad let me proudly carry inside, and you have them so clean.

They were simply boiled, with butter, salt, and pepper. I remember the taste. It reminded me of the very land I walked upon every day, the essence of our own place. They were white and the red skins so sweet. I was forever hooked on the sport of robbing new potatoes from their nests.

As a youth, during the 1950’s, I walked down gravel roads and dusty streets, past fading Elect Eisenhower posters. My leather shoes collected particles of dirt and my cotton shoelaces were frayed on the ends. I approached the little general store. Inside the store the aisles were paved in hardwood and the wooden shelves harbored what seemed like endless delights packaged in either paper or steel. Containers in the cooler were of wax-coated paper or glass. The age of plastic wrapping had not yet arrived and aluminum was still a fairly mysterious feather-light product that had only begun to be exploited in the commercial realm. Even candy was sold from bulk bins and put into brown paper bags. There were no large, wheeled carts to fill with over-packaged volumes of products. Shelf space was much too precious to waste on wide aisles to accommodate carts. The store owner accompanied me to the cooler to get a quart of milk in a returnable bottle and placed it upon the counter. We then fanned out to other parts of the store to pick out boxes and bags of staples such as oatmeal, flour, and sugar, placing them with my other purchases. Consumerism wasn’t a hobby or a breathless romp in a shiny concrete maze filled with endless bargains and signs designed to titillate our most hedonistic desires.

I exited the store, screen door slamming behind me, with a single, brown- paper bag in my arm, carrying only the most basic products; those which we didn’t produce at our own home. In our neck of the woods, life was simple and inherently ‘green.’ Of course green was only the color of grass to me at that time. Words like ‘environment’ or even ‘conservation’ were foreign terms.

Today we find that everybody and every company wants to be ‘green.’ Those who sell us bottled water try to tell us their product is ‘environmentally friendly’ because the plastic bottles used to package their water are thinner than those of the competition. Those who sell us hybrid cars want us to think their electric-powered cars are environmentally friendly, even though the cars are recharged by electricity generated by coal or diesel fuel. Bread is wholesome because it is ‘natural,’ even though it is produced from genetically-engineered wheat, grown with petro-chemical fertilizer. Today we are being ‘greened’ to death by pure and natural soaps derived from chemicals with names too long to pronounce or so-called healthy breakfast cereals preserved with chemicals that only have initials to identify them.

I grew up in a generation that knew nothing about ‘green.’ In the fifties when I was a child we didn’t even know what plastic was. Nothing we bought was packaged in anything but paper, or refillable glass bottles. We canned our own vegetables in jars that had been used and re-used by our grand- parents.

Even our newspapers, if we got one, were bundled up and sent off to a once-a-year mystery called the ‘paper drive.’ For some unknown reason everyone we knew took their bundles of old news-papers and pitched them into an old stock truck parked at the church, once or twice a year. The church youth group got some money when the truck was driven to a place in the Cities where the papers were apparently ground up and made back into paper. When I became old enough to be involved with the youth group, I remember the Treasurer’s report having a deposit from the ‘paper drive.’ It was never an overwhelming amount of cash; maybe twelve to fifteen dollars, but it was some kind of recycling project. We had never heard the word ‘recycling’ nor did we have the slightest idea that this was a ‘green’ activity. I do also remember marveling at how little money a whole truck load of newspaper was worth.

Beverage bottles were all returned to the seller for refilling. Three cents was a pretty good motivation for kids to search out any empty bottles and take them to the local store for the refund.

We didn’t waste much in the early years of my growing up. Once a week we would go outside and burn the few things such as waxed paper that wrapped frozen meat, or brown paper bags that were too worn out to be reused to carry someone’s lunch to school or work. Any trimmings from vegetables or potato peels were put into a special pail that was emptied into and buried in the garden. We didn’t buy a lot of things, so there wasn’t packaging to dispose. Any packaging was either sent to the ‘paper drive’ or burned outside. We didn’t have a garbage service, since there really was no garbage to be picked up and hauled to a landfill.

Snowmobiles and ATV’s weren’t part of our vocabulary as young kids. Thoughts of skis, snowshoes, and sleds dominated our desires. We pulled our sleds to the top of the hill the old fashioned way and got our kicks from the old concept of gravity and slippery winter forms of water. The woods were still silent as I cross-country skied as a youth. The old wooden boards, strapped to my four-buckle overshoes with a single leather band, were the best way to get out into those wooded hills near our home. Cross-country skiing wasn’t some environmentally-correct way to get exercise, it was the best way for a rural kid to hunt and trap in the Minnesota wintertime. I never thought about the environment when I pursued these hobbies, but I suppose it was a pretty good alternative when compared to today’s kids burning gasoline in snowmobiles and four-wheelers. I can’t believe how ‘green’ we were, yet certainly not by our own design. We’d have gone for the snowmobile in a heartbeat, and certainly did just a few years later.

In those days, when the garden needed to be worked for planting, we turned the soil with a garden fork and worked it smooth with a rake. We cultivated the rows with a hand tool called a hoe and had only remotely heard of something called a rototiller.

I don’t recall ever hearing the word ’recycling,’ yet the concept wasn’t totally lost on my dad. Sometimes he got rid of old or recently-replaced items by throwing them out the window of the car. I realize this sounds a lot like littering, although at that time it wasn’t really unheard of to dispose of old items in this manner. He always threw his old shoes out at the same place along a rural road. I wondered about it until he remarked that the person who lived near that place always showed up in town wearing those same used shoes. I guess one person’s litter was another man’s treasure.

I think that the idea of ‘green’ would have never been needed if the lifestyle of the fifties had prevailed. Economies were pretty local, people worked close to home as small towns were still thriving, which helped create a local economy and social structure. People just didn’t have as much consumable stuff to go after. Most people were gardeners, because they liked the food and a garden just plain saved money.

I am not one to denounce advances in technology and the prosperity they have seemingly brought to most people. How could we not like all the electric gadgets and the incredible communications that we now enjoy? Yet, certainly all the advances have brought a great need to be concerned about the environment. During my years as I grew up in a world of great advances, there has been a growing awareness of the need to care for the earth. We have made great strides in air and water quality in the U.S. and we have many still-pristine and beautiful areas to enjoy.

Taking care of the environment has changed from an endeavor of love and self-sacrifice to a much commercialized concept. Crafty marketers have sent us all on a guilt trip of ‘greenness.’ We are compelled to buy the correct products because they are advertised to be better for the environment. We are deluged with so-called ‘natural’ products and guilted into buying them. Perhaps some become complacent about doing the real work of conservation because they feel they have paid their dues by buying the correct products.

Having grown up in the pre-green era, I wonder about the money that is spent on and donated to causes that really have little to do with actually doing genuinely good things for the environment and the habitats that are so extremely important.

Yet I digress, for my formative years were spent in total oblivion to environmental issues. I believe much of our lifestyle in those years was as environmentally sound as it could get, yet we didn’t even think about it. If something new came along that made life easier, we espoused it. Canned green beans, bought at the store, were a lot easier than growing your own. We soon learned that battery-powered transistor radios were really handy, giving us music even where there were no electric outlets or cords. When plastic bags became available, they really did keep the sandwich in the school lunch box fresher than the old waxed-paper.

It wasn’t long before a sixteen year old boy bought into the concept of big V-eight engines and fast cars. Gas was only twenty-five cents a gallon and we didn’t really think about fuel economy when driving.

Bring it home with some gas in it, were the last words we heard as we left the house and putting a couple of dollars’ worth of gas into Dad’s car got us a long ways.

Yet even as new things became available for us to consume, there was always a tempering of common sense that seemed to pervade our household. Even though canned corn was cheap and potatoes were only pennies a pound to buy, we still had a garden.

The vegetables from the garden just taste better, my mom would say.

There’s nothing like good old rotted manure on the garden, my dad commented as he pitched the stuff from his truck into the garden. We kids just didn’t get it. We thought such labor was pointless. We were however, ‘greened up’ a bit by our parents’ insistence that some things are too good to change.

Certainly there were some basic grounding principles derived from growing up in a rural Minnesota environment. We never got too far from the soil. We knew how food was actually produced. We hunted and fished and learned that if we wanted these resources, they needed to be taken care of. We learned some first-hand conservation. When someone cut down a piece of hardwood forest where we liked to hunt squirrels, we knew the loss of habitat first hand, for it affected us personally.

Farmers in those days were beginning to use more pesticides, but still farmed relatively small acreages and actually rotated several crops to help with fertility and weed control.

When we finally got a telephone that didn’t have a crank on it, I remember using that same old desk phone for ten or fifteen years. It seemed to be a fixture in our home, not a plastic piece of planned obsolescence that would need replacement every year or so.

Now in the two-thousands, electronic gadgets become obsolete so quickly we hardly remember what they looked like. We are encouraged to trade in the old model for a new more efficient version of technical wizardry. Meanwhile, the mountainous piles of old technology mound heavenward as we seek the newer version of ‘green’ technology. Trying to attain that elusive pinnacle of environmental consciousness seems to come at enormous cost, both monetarily and environmentally.

My dad surely never knew what the modern term ‘green’ meant. I would guess he might have scoffed at such a concept. Yet he hauled loads of manure into his beautiful and productive garden. He hoed and pulled weeds to keep his garden neat and productive and he put wood ashes on his squash to repel the bugs that would destroy his crop. He never knew that he was ‘green.’

As kids, we wondered why anyone would go to all the trouble of shoveling tons of cow shit into the garden, when bags of granular fertilizer were so much easier and so much more appealing, yet for many gardeners of my youth, it was just a way of life, merely a habit.

I suppose frugality was another factor that promoted a kind of ‘greenness’ during my growing up. Raised from good old German stock, nothing was wasted in our neighborhood. If a hog was butchered, everything from the ears to the hooves was utilized. Extra produce was canned or pickled. Even gasoline, which was only pennies per gallon, was conserved and no unnecessary trips were made. No one needed to tell a frugal old German housewife how to be ‘green.’

Of course the following sixties and seventies were times of great change. Our economy was expanding; new technologies were sources of amazement. Traveling to the moon became an achievable goal. With such advances came great challenges to the environment.

2. A Green B.A.

In 1968 I shipped off to the big city. A kid from rural Minnesota found himself attending college in St. Paul. The city smelled different; always a kind of sooty, abrasive smoke in the air. The city also sounded different with constant traffic and the sound of never-ending commerce and perpetual movement. The view was constantly obstructed by buildings and people always in sight and moving about.

During the week, there seemed to be heavy class loads and plenty of issues to keep one focused away from urban life. There were term papers to write, war and peace to be discussed, and environmental issues to debate. The seemingly endless conflict in Vietnam dragged on and racial unrest in the aftermath of the tragic death of Dr. Martin Luther King was a constant topic of discussion. I began not to notice that the air smelled like the effluent from a plastic factory, the city water tasted like it had been filtered through a land-fill, and the constant traffic noise from an open window could drown out the Led Zeppelin record from across the hall.

There was little green to be found in the city for me. Only my weekend forays to a more pastoral environment kept my sanity. I would burst from the stagnant urban bubble of grime and pollution and imbibe hours of clean air and rolling countryside. At least in Minnesota, the countryside was never far away. Living in the city showed me just how great the rural folks have it. But in the city, I also found that there was a genuine craving for the kind of things I had always taken for granted. There were the beginnings of food co-ops which advocated home grown ‘organic’ food. I also found involvement with groups that cleaned up polluted areas and cherished the lakes and parks in the Twin Cities.

College teachers really wanted to change us, make us aware of the environment and, I suppose, they wanted to turn us green. Yet the term wasn’t used, and they just slipped the ideology to us on the sly.

I went to college believing that all was well. The trees were green, the ducks were still flying just like in my childhood. I could go back to lakes and sloughs that I had always enjoyed, and the land seemed just as pristine and inviting in the old home territory as ever. Upon arriving in college, I found that the eagle, our national symbol was becoming extinct and Lake Erie was dead and nothing but a big cesspool.

I had thought that all was fine: we had reasonable limits on fish and game, people were littering less, and farmers seemed to be growing their crops as usual. Yet in college I was confronted with some entirely different information.

I had always enjoyed the outdoors, so it didn’t take much to get me into an outdoor education class or to convince me to work in outdoor education for my student teaching experience. Our teachers attempted to make us aware of our environment as we approached the 70s. Such was especially true if one happened to take an ecology class in college. We didn’t know we were being indoctrinated. The required reading material was Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and to a college student of eighteen or nineteen, it wasn’t good news. We could look forward to a dying earth and a decreasing quality of life. It wasn’t a real optimistic outlook. I think some students decided it would be best to live it up, take whatever was left of life and pursue it to the fullest. Thank goodness some of our teachers had a vision of hope, and believed in the ability of the earth to heal and respond to changes in our habits and outlook.

Some of us became environmentalists and did all we could do to save the planet. A few of us decided that noble pursuits would involve opportunities to educate people or grow food that was wholesome and chemical-free. We felt that banning DDT and other serious pesticides would save the earth. We had the hope that things could still be salvaged, and degradation of life on earth was not inevitable. Since the outdoors had always been a prime interest of mine, I felt that education, especially outdoor education was a noble goal.

Pursuing a degree in education ultimately meant that one needed to participate in a student teaching experience. Since we were on a college quarter system, it involved going to a school and working with a teacher for a quarter. We were eventually expected to take over the teaching responsibility of that particular classroom, and do all the day to day things that our cooperating teacher did.

I was fortunate in that I was one of the first students from