My gardening journey probably began with my great-grandmother’s thrifty gardening genes, and spending a few glorious years of my childhood in a marvellous tangled and overgrown garden surrounding a wooden house that was over 100 years old at the time that left me with a sense of true delight in growing, living plants, in birds, bugs and frogs.
Fast-forward to age thirteen and I was watching my stepfather die a slow, terrible death from a totally preventable cancer. I was never a particularly social child and his death only made me more introverted. I read everything – my parent’s British science fiction, my sister’s book club magazines, the neighbour’s textbooks, the Bible, articles on comparative religion, stock-raising manuals, and even the encyclopaedia – yes, from cover to cover. I was interested in everything. Years of my own chronic bronchitis had me looking around for reasons why I was unhealthy, which led me to what research was around back in the mid-seventies about nutrition, and on to herbal medicine.
My conclusion even then was that food, being the very building blocks that our cells require to replicate, was the answer. I mean REAL food. I’d been a very healthy and robust young child while my mother was cooking real, fresh meat and vegetables, but when my stepfather became ill we began eating a lot of canned and packaged food. even our cheese was the infamous Velveeta “cheese” and Rice-a-Riso, tinned soup with white bread, and Kraft Mac-and-Cheese were weekly staples. I don’t remember having even a fresh piece of fruit or fresh milk from about ten years old.
By the time I was thirteen I had a faceful of acne, I was always sick with one thing or another, and was constantly breathless from bronchitis. I was unfit and overweight and constantly hungry, even though I was obviously getting way too many calories.
So I kept looking into nutrition, and when i left home at sixteen I began being able to look for my own food choices. I had a brief foray into vegetarianism from eighteen to twenty-one, back to omnivore through the pregnancy with my twins and the breastfeeding period, then back to vegetarianism at twenty-six on the insistence of my (then) husband. He seemed to do well but I became very ill. When my youngest was two and a half I was floored by Glandular Fever and then Bahmar Forest virus in the same year. I was weak, listless, constantly exhausted, always hungry and constantly craving sweets. At the time, I had four kids underfoot, working part-time on weekends and was planting out a 2/3 of an acre property. I didn’t have a diagnosis at the time, but I was suffering from Fibromyalgia and Chronic Myofascial Pain Syndrome. Don’t get me wrong, we ate very well, homegrown vegetables and mushrooms, lots of cheese, Kefir and other dairy, bread I would bake myself, eggs from the chook lady up the road and wholemeal cake with real butter that I would bake for the kid’s school lunches.
What was missing for me, was protein, pure and simple.
My journey to managing the Fibromyalgia and becoming well again began with the back-to-basics approach of what I call my farmhouse cooking – fresh plain meat, vegetables, less starch and potatoes, and lots of homegrown herbs.
Riverworks - the blog. 