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Hello! And welcome to our blog page! I wanted to take just a few minutes to discuss how this site came about, and what we mean by encouraging people to “grow health yourself”. I am a college educated mother of two who married her college sweetheart…20 years after we met. After he’d worked for a veterinarian for a while, decided he was more suited for research, and went back to school and got his doctorate in cell/micro/developmental biology so he could pursue rare childhood cancer research. In the many years that he was pursuing school, I had gotten my bachelors of science, worked in ministry for a bit, then worked in several human hospitals, and landed in a veterinary hospital where our paths crossed again, and we ultimately got married. Since just after the birth of our first child (2 months early) my husband was fired (basically for being Christian in a largely liberal laboratory), survived NYC, been fired for relying on natural immunity after having survived the pandemic, were denied workers compensation unjustly, lived through racism against our special needs child just because he was white, and decided to homeschool to give our now two children the best chance at a productive life free from overt anti-white discrimination among other things. So I went from being the primary source of income during our time in NYC to being a homeschool mom, and eventually to starting this little business.
So, why this site? Why Grow Health Yourself? This is why:
During our time in NYC during the pandemic, I had a 6 month old and a special needs 3 yr old. Literally 5-6 weeks after we started special needs pre-K, the school went virtual. So I had a tiny 3 year old expected to school “virtually”. I was let go from my job after returning to work 8 weeks after giving birth to our 2nd child by a man who started his new CEO position literally the week I delivered my son. He hardly even introduced himself to me, despite the fact that I was the director of information systems for the firm, and it was ever so very obvious he had issues with me having the audacity to birth a child while working. So he made my life miserable with assignments that had nothing to do with my job, and ultimately fired me literally the day before he was forced to resign from the company. We were a relatively healthy family with a preemie facing failure to thrive primarily due to very low birth weight. We eat healthy, love the outdoors, frequently hike, camp several times yearly, and generally love to love life, and all this world has to offer in terms of nature! After written policies made it clear that my son’s needs would be met absolutely last only because he was a white boy (yes, NYC has those policies in writing) we decided, as my husband was nearing the end of his post-doctoral fellowship and was fully expected to get a research professorship that we should be more than capable of living off of, that I really had no choice but to stay home so that our oldest (now in the narrow window of rapid braid development) could get the most out of the less than desirable educational environment he was now in. So I basically took on his education, making sure he made his virtual appointments for schooling, with services that included twice a week physical therapy, twice a week occupational therapy, and 4 times a week speech therapy sessions, as well as his virtual weekly feeding therapy appointments, and weekly speech prompt therapy appointments that we were getting through insurance. I made it my job to learn what the therapists were doing to help him learn the things most of us never have to consciously think about. I lived through our pediatrician only seeing well visits. I lived through a doctor who took an oath to do no harm tell me that I would have to take my two healthy children to an emergency room or a walk-in clinic because they were so afraid of the pandemic that they would only see unsick children to vaccinate them, and nothing else. And we wonder why there were so many sick in the large cities? I lived through padlocked playgrounds and discussions of state sponsored “reeducation camps”. I watched as a pediatrician lost custody of her own daughter in a custody battle because she dared to walk her daughter to school unmasked. I paid attention to what was actually going on in the courts. And I, who was pre-med in college, worked in hospitals most of my adult life, and who married a rare childhood cancer researcher, I watched as supposedly educated people lost all sense of basic knowledge and logic because they were told to be afraid of a pandemic.
I’ve always been conscientious of what I consume. I have struggled with weight and health issues, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that healthy food can be absolutely delicious. And I want to know what I am consuming because I want to be as healthy as I can be. I believe in exercise. I believe in spending time in nature. I believe in eating whole foods — foods that are consumed raw or very close to raw. I prefer to eat foods that are raw, steamed, or grilled. I have an extreme sensitivity to highly processed foods, and I know for my body that I do much better when foods are consumed in a manner that is pretty close to natural.
So after my husband was fired for refusing to get a gene therapy that was being called a “vaccine” for a virus that he had already survived (who was even donating convalescent plasma from to help protect cancer patients and others who had weakened immune systems and were not vaccine eligible), I started doubting the food supply. With the cost of fresh foods rising, and the threat of supply chain issues looming in the future, I started a garden. Frankly, we eat far too many fresh foods to be able to afford not to have a garden.
Besides, I really wanted my (now homeschooled) children to understand where their food comes from. I’d worked with people in the past who literally “only ate eggs from the store” (as opposed to eggs “from chickens”)… We started taking trips to farms and we started a garden. We grew a small 2×4 raised garden with tomatoes, green beans, and we planted carrots, but they didn’t have the right environment to thrive, getting choked out by other plants. I learned a lot with that first garden. When our beautiful tomato plants began to fruit, our tomatoes had end root rot. So I went to researching natural ways to resolve this issue. I discovered that I could dry out and grind eggs to make egg shell powder, and you could soak some egg shell powder in a little vinegar, dilute a capful into a gallon jug of water, and water your plants with it, and it would get enough calcium into the plant to resolve the issue. And it did. So I started researching lots of stuff. How to add potassium to soil naturally. How to fight white flies, horn worms, and other critters. And I fell in love with the simplicity of it, and was saddened and fascinated by how much we throw away that has nutritive value, and the potential to grow healthy food which fight disease and sickness.
During all this time, I had been diagnosed with a serious digestive disorder, and was having to visit hospitals far too often for CT scans. I was literally told that I would potentially die if I got an infection and did not get prescription antibiotics — often multiple rounds of them. I learned through trial and error that I could fast solids and dose up on some really good broad spectrum probiotics (not the ones you can just pick up from the grocery store), and could actually stave off a hospital stay by getting rid of the severe infection with healthy probiotics instead of the antibiotics that the medical profession was swearing I would die without. So, contrary to western medicine, I was able to heal myself with something that was actually good for my body — something that not a single doctor had ever advised against taking… but not a single one was prescribing. So why weren’t they proactively prescribing these things instead of waiting for people to just get sick, and then prescribing antibiotics, which also further destroy the microbiome of the gut?…
So my perspective of healthcare over time shifted. Between watching how doctors were directed institutionally to follow protocols for diagnosis and treatments prior to the pandemic of 2019, seeing how hospital are absolutely driven by the money they can make, and being educated enough to understand a wide range of medical conditions and believing that there are solutions far better than pharmaceuticals out there, I began the journey of growing health myself. I still have a picture in my mind of the perfect garden. I don’t have it yet, but I’m amassing a wishlist of plants and learning how to self-process those plants so that they are healthy, and the power of those plants are used synergistically to enhance our body’s own ability to heal itself.
I got my herbalist certification, and am on a never ending quest to learn all I can about what nutritional and medicinal qualities are in the many plants God put on this beautiful earth. How to care for my family, my friends, and my garden in natural ways is a passion I have. Growing and foraging foods and medicines is a healing act in areas beyond the actual food and medicine itself. Going out into the natural environment that God placed us in is nourishing to the mind, spirit, and soul, as well as the physical body. There is so much to be learned about God when we learn about the natural place that God set us down into so many generations ago.
Having always loved science I love learning about how God created this earth. I love learning about the laws that describe how God designed the universe, solar system, and world in which we live. I love how the simplist cell reflects the entire universe. I love how the cell that keeps our bodies held together is in the shape of a cross. I love that He is reflected in everything He has created. And He created us in his image, so I also enjoy seeing how mankind has used the knowledge of what He has created, and how He has created it, to create things as well. I enjoy technology and inventions, and seeing what all can be done and accomplished when we leverage that knowledge with the beauty of His creation to better use what He has given to us in this earth. I am not against progress, but I do believe that we are responsible for taking care of the planet God created for us to live in. After all, we are called to steward this earth, not destroy it, and we must in our intelligence be cognizant of how what we do to this earth nourishes or destroys it and therefore potentially that which God put here for our good. For if we destroy what God has given us, we are clearly not appreciative of it. And more than any single person on this earth, God knows exactly what we need far better than we do. So no matter how much we think we know better, we will never know better than God what is good for us.
So let’s talk technology in gardening: I love the idea of hydroponics and even more so aquaponics. I like that with the right tools, you can grow hydroponically in any environment. And if your goal is to create a source of survival, with aquaponics, you can grow protein and produce alike by synergistically creating an environment where you grow a subset of food that feeds the fish, which in turn eat the food and produce excrement in the water, which can then be siphoned through to feed the plants (both the fish food as well as your food), and the cycle repeats. So as long as you have sunlight and/or the appropriate artificial light, as well as the necessary energy to power the filter and the lights, you can grow all sorts of things pretty much anywhere! I like that hydroponic systems, and if you have enough space even an aquaponics system, when set up correctly, can be propagated indoors and protected from others. The food is cleaner. The work is lighter. Your home is prettier (depending, of course on how you execute your garden), and your air is actually cleaner. I love the symbiosis of life. We exhale CO2. Plants essentially “inhale” CO2 and from it produce O2. So we need plants, and they need us. It’s really quite simple, and quite beautiful.
After living through the insanity of NYC during the pandemic, I saw first hand how western medicine abandoned all semblance of “do no harm” for their own irrational fears. I lived through the pediatrician only seeing children to give them vaccines, but refusing to see them for an ear infection, insisting that I’d have to take my otherwise well children to either a walk-in clinic or the emergency room (you know where all the people who suspected they had the pandemic were) for their ear infection to be taken care of. I don’t care how you spin that one, there is absolutely not a shred of “do no harm” in that. Thankfully we had on hand what was needed to treat that ear infection, and I told my pediatrician how against the oath she took her actions were before I hung up. But I thought to myself, “what must I learn to be able to take care of my family without access to western medicine?” After all, this was the situation we were then living in. We had essentially no access to western medicine without subjecting ourselves to the overwhelming assumption that anything and everything was the potentially fatal pandemic. Unwilling to subject my family to that insanity, I wanted to find another way. A healthier and more sane way.
And this is essentially how Grow Health Yourself was born. Out of the desire to provide healthy cures for the malady’s of life today, I started to learn about the healing properties of plants, and learned that there are plants considered by most to be weeds that are highly beneficial for curing things! So I’m learning what can be used, and how to prepare it. As I was learning, and before we had completely abandoned over the counter medications, I got what I thought was a cold. After coughing for about 6 weeks and it not going away, I figured I might actually need antibiotics, and went to see a doctor. After several trips to the doctor, and a CT scan of my chest, I was referred to a pulmonologist with the suggestion that I might have cancer in my lungs… While I was getting this workup done, I was taking courses to get my herbalist certificate, and read about what happens when you burn bay leaves. Despite the fact that breathing in smoke went against my training that “smoke is bad for you,” I gave it a try, and immediately stopped coughing (mind you I’d had that cough for months…). But with the bay leaves it would work pretty quickly, for the upper respiratory cough I had, but the deep lung cough would come back within the day. When I learned that urning mullein leaves could actually heal the lungs, I added some mullein leaf powder that I had on hand to the top of my bay leaves, and breathed that in, and literally after only 2 times breathing in that smoke, that cough went away and did NOT return! I was sold. What I had literally had worked up for 6 months with my regular doctor went away in a day with two “treatments”. All along the way with that lung issue, because of the way the symptoms would wax and wayne, I really thought I must have had some kind of rare bacterial pneumonia, which would have been consistent with what we were seeing on the xrays and CT scans. I cannot definitively say that’s what it was, but what I can definitively say is that it went away, and has not come back! And the docs have cleared me with a clean CT scan. Proof was right there on the scan!
But what of my children? My youngest had had two sets of tubes in his ears because of a condition called “glue ear”, which we discovered when he was speech delayed at 2 years old. Unfortunately to this day he is prone to ear infections, particularly in one of his ears that has a hole in the membrane where the tube once was… What was I to do, as my antibiotic ear drops had run out? I took him to see a doctor, and we got more antibiotics. But without a prescription, those antibiotics are unavailable to me. I know exactly how to tell if he has an ear infection. And I know exactly what he needs to treat it. I just don’t have access to that medicine unless I pay a lot of money to go see a doctor, who will charge me hundreds of dollars for what I already know, and who will write a prescription for that medicine I know I need. Without that prescription that I have now paid hundreds of dollars for, I can’t get the medicine I already knew he needed, as the pharmacy won’t sell it to me. That medicine is like $8. But I have to spend $308 to get it because of the ridiculousness of it all. I understand not everyone can know for sure. But I can, and I find it absolutely obnoxious that I and my son both require antibiotics on occassion which I can precisely and accurately call, but still have to pay hundreds sometimes thousands of dollars to “see a doctor” before I can get. So I got to researching: is there a way I can make my own antibiotics so that I have them on hand should I need them? Turns out it is entirely possible, and you probably have what you need in your spice cabinet. Even better, you could grow your own herbs to make it. But nobody wants you to know you have these things available. That you don’t have to have a doctor see every little scrape and cough. You can heal without any help at all in many cases. And in other cases, you can heal yourself with what God has provided if you just educated yourself on why it works and how to make it. Now, I am no doctor, and I cannot legally give you any medical advice at all, nor would I. But I can tell you that God has put everything we need right here on this earth if we just have the will to research it and find it.
This is how Grow Health Yourself was born. This is why this website exists! I want to encourage others to Grow your own health. Grow healthier by making better choices about what you put into your body. Learn about where your food comes from. What is essential for growing it, and how it can benefit your body. Think about what ailments you really need medicine for, and do a little research. There are pre-prepared formulas of natural medicines and tinctures and oils that are known to treat most medical conditions. Try them, and see if they work for you. See what you can do for yourself so that your reliance on western medicine isn’t so crucial. I cannot even begin to express to you how reassuring it is to know that I have in my medicine cabinet things that can help with most of our common issues without the need to see a doctor. Yes, we will see them if we need to. I’m not anti-medicine. I just don’t like the level of reliance we’d had, and having been placed in a position where western medicine did my family no good, and potentially harmed my children, I wanted an alternative. And I found several that so far have worked far better than going to the doctor – and as a bonus they were far less expensive. Teach your children how to grow the food they eat. Teach them about sunlight, water, and essential soil nutrients. Teach them how to clean up toxic soils, and how to compost! Teach them about worms and how you can naturally deter the pests that eat your food. In the meanwhile, you’ll all get outside more often, and that sunlight will do you some good as well. Learn how much fun it is to splash in puddles. Live your life more fully, and see how much healthier your body can be! Grow Health Yourself!!!
Growing and consuming your own food and medicine frees you from the confines of an expensive & often unhealthy medical system. So please, take a look around, and consider how a small hydroponic garden might help you get started in your own home. If you prefer the outdoor gardening experience, perhaps an elevated garden bed might be a great place to start. Or if you already have a bountiful garden in mind, perhaps you should consider raised garden beds with cattle fencing connecting their sides to create beautiful garden tunnels to walk through that you can literally just pick your produce off from above your head! We have all the tools you’ll need, and are even carrying a few seeds to get you started! And when you’ve learned what herbs and plants can heal your medical issues, take a look at the tools section for all that you’d need to process your plants and transform them into the medicines that can work with your body to heal itself! From herb scissors to pill forms, we’re building those pages with a purpose, so that you can have all that you need in one place! Come back regularly and check out our blog posts for helpful content, and we look forward to hearing all about how YOU Grow Health Yourself!