• Hedlin Farms, Mount Vernon, WA. Extensive organic farm. I managed the farm stand during the 2010 season. Under my development plan, sales increased significantly.
• Filaree Farm, Omak, Wash. They grow garlic which they sell for seed to gardeners. They keep 80 kinds of garlic, including many heirloom varieties. It is a small catalog operation. I worked the harvest for one week, sorting garlic in the barn.
• Arnold Arboretum (Harvard University), course work on conifers, rhododendrons and lilacs. I lived in Boston from 1991-96 and worked as a landscaper there. I became very familiar with the soil types of New England. I also learned the climate and flora of that region in a very hands-on way.
• Neil Jorgenson, the author of New England’s Landscape, had a Ph.D. in Geology, but he worked as a Landscape Designer. I worked for him in 1995-96, and learned a lot about stones, especially, but also about maples and rhododendrons.
• Membership in the New England Bamboo Society, and extensive hands-on seminars with Roger Geffen, a Boston-area bamboo expert.
• The Zimbabwe Tree Society. I lived in Zimbabwe for one year in 1997. I worked under the guidance of the Zimbabwe Tree Society, a group of amateur and professional botanists, taking field trips, learning the many types of acacias and other plants. My favorite tree was the baobab. I worked at the Mbukaweni Nature Preserve, a small park outside off Bulawayo, where we attempted to eradicate or at least limit alien species. I also grew vegetables and herbs. This was a volunteer position. I was very fortunate to have the time and the money to do this
• Farm and Ranch Editor at the Wilson County News in South Texas, 2005-6. I wrote news and feature stories about local agriculture – cattle auctions, livestock shows, 4H clubs, veterinarians, farriers, feed stores and feed mills, dairy farms, hay growers and hay dealers, pecan orchards, olive groves, market gardens, and more. The ongoing story that year was about a punishing drought and how it adversely affected local farmers.
• Several years of Farm Labor in the Skagit Valley – Pea vining, planting seed beets, harvesting daffodils and irises at Lefeber Bulb Company. Manual labor, hard work.
• Cascadian Farm, Rockport, Wash., Cascadian Farm is now a huge corporate-owned organic foods empire, but in the late 1970’s it was just a bunch of unpaid grunts with some unusual ideas – just my luck to do all that work when there wasn’t any money. Now the founder, Gene Kahn, is a multi-millionaire, but back then he packed shakes at a shake mill to supplement his farm income.
• US Forest Service. In 1970-71 I fought forest fires in North Cascades National Park and other places in the Cascades. I organized and supervised a hippy crew of firefighters known as the Marblemount Hotshots. This was one of the first private contract crews used by the Forest Service – it also helped to get a bunch of hippies at the Commune off of food stamps and back into the economy. We pressed the Forest Service to hire women as well as men – that took a while, but it happened.
• “Northwest Fishing Forecast” was a quarterly publication on the “history, culture, technology, politics and economics” of fishing in the Pacific Northwest. I wrote and published this in 1985-1986.
• Fishtown Woods, 1988. I sued the state of Washington regarding the logging of an almost old-growth forest called Fishtown Woods near the mouth of the Skagit River. It was a big controversy. I did lots of organizing work. We lost.
• South LaConner Community Garden. I organized a community garden in our neighborhood. It took a lot of work and coordination to get the blackberries and junk off the lot. Then we rototilled and planted. The yields were never high, but the education and companionship made it worthwhile.
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