Homeschool News & Views
Issue 80, August 3, 2008
From Homeschool Helpers
In association with Pass It On Ministries
By Dan L. White
A very dear friend sent me an email containing this statement from an atheist.
“It’s good that Christians
homeschool. We need citizens to clean
our toilets and mow our lawns. Perhaps
some homeschooled Christians will be able to fill these types of jobs. The rest will be unemployable retards like
their parents.”
Have you noticed that
liberals don’t usually discuss, but they usually
disparage?
They scoff and mock, make
fun and ridicule. They automatically
assume that they are intellectually gifted and morally superior. In that mode they
don’t really have to justify their positions, so they just lampoon those who
don’t follow their lifestyle. You will
see that repeatedly, as in the way they portray President Bush. That’s not a new
thing with this president. They did that
with previous conservative presidents, totally disrespecting the man and the
office.
Again the atheist wrote,
“It’s good that Christians homeschool. We need
citizens to clean our toilets and mow our lawns. Perhaps
some homeschooled Christians will be able to fill these types of jobs. The rest will be unemployable retards like their parents.”
That was
sent to me by my friend Dan Wrigley, who lives in Illinois, just east of St.
Louis. Dan heads the organization American Institute for Judeo-Christian Values.
The web site is aijcv.org. We used to get up there every few months to
visit with the folks in that area. That’s one effect of the gas price hike. We don’t do that any
more, unfortunately.
This has been an unusual year
for us.
First of
all, the cool weather kept
hanging on after the winter. We burned more wood than we ever had, which meant that I had to keep
cutting it.
Secondly, we got more rain
by June than practically any half year since they have been keeping records.
Rain makes things
grow. Here in the Ozarks, at this time
of the year we can usually hear the grass complain when we walk on it. August grass normally crunches with a dry,
brown grunt. This year, though, we have
been as green as West Virginia, and only in the last few days has it gotten really hot.
Indeed the rain made
things grow. The blackberries, tomatoes,
cucumbers, corn, squash and okra all grew like kudzu. But so did the
fungus. All the wild fruit trees and
berries here carry anthracnose fungus.
It doesn’t kill them, but it is murder on tame
stock.
With the super wet year,
the anthracnose grew all over everything, even the trees. We have a big elm tree whose leaves are all
yellow and crinkled, way before autumn.
Even some of the tough oaks are yielding their bottom leaves to the
fanatical fungus. And
the fungus is hurting everything in our garden, except for the Burmese okra.
What is Burmese okra? That’s okra from
Burma.
This is our first year to
grow it, and we think it is terrific.
The problem with growing okra is that it grows so fast, you have to pick
it every day. For example, we picked our
okra on Friday, we did not pick it yesterday on the Sabbath, and today there
were foot long pods hanging from the plants.
With most varieties of okra, by the time the pod gets that big you can
hardly even cut it with a knife, much less eat it, so it’s
wasted. Burmese okra, though, is still
tender in that overgrown stage. The long
pods are not wasted.
So how in the world did we
get okra from Burma?
We got it from a
homeschooler.
Jeremiath Gettle was a local
homeschool boy. We settled in the Ozarks
22 years ago and the Gettle family settled here a few
years after us, moving here from the far northwest. They bought an Ozarks farm about ten miles
south of us, lived on their farm and homeschooled their children. That’s the way
homeschooling was back then, part of an overall lifestyle package. That’s a good way to
do it, to really keep the family together.
After the Gettle kids became older teens, we saw Jere,
as he is called, at some local household
auctions. We were there looking for
bargains, of course, usually garden tools and such. At these auctions we
noticed Jeremiath was buying up most of the lots. He was buying big items, like furniture. He was too young to be married and was still
living with his folks, so I asked him what he was
doing buying all that stuff. He said he
was buying it to sell on Ebay.
Now that was a number of
years ago. At the time
I didn’t even know what Ebay was. That incident stuck in my
mind, though, because it certainly seemed that Jeremiath
Gettle was an entrepreneur.
Sometime after that, Jere built on his interest in seeds. His family is Seventh Day Adventist, I think they are vegetarian, and Jere
had an interest in heirloom seeds.
Heirloom seeds are older, non-hybrid varieties.
From his bedroom, Jere began a business of selling heirloom seeds, and he
caught a wave. That bedroom seed
business became Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds,
at rareseeds.com, now one of the nation’s largest companies of its kind.
Here is Jere’s brief bio from his web site, which is a little
outdated now, because his business has grown even more.
“Jeremiath
C. Gettle is a young entrepreneur who has a passion
for preserving unique and colorful ethnic seed varieties before they totally
disappear, and for fighting those corporations which are destroying much of the
earth's genetic heritage through gene-altering and modern agricultural methods.
Born in September 1980, Jeremiath says that he has been interested in gardening
from as early as he can remember. At the age of 4
years, Jeremiath was planting his own garden of
scallop squash and yellow pear tomatoes. At age 7,
while other children were opening lemonade stands, Jeremiath
was producing "play" seed catalogs. Later,
he could be found at local swap meetings, offering a
treasure of seed, stored in cardboard boxes and packaged in small handmade
envelopes.
Jeremiath said that one of his favorite pastimes has always
been perusing seed catalogs, deciding what to order for each year's garden;
always wanting to try the odd and unique vegetables. "I
looked through the different catalogs and bought the most unique varieties
which were offered." Jeremiath's
interest in preserving heirloom varieties really grew in 1990 when he
discovered catalogs like Tomato Growers Supply Company, who had just started
offering heirlooms. Also about that time
he heard about Seed Savers Exchange; although he didn't join Seed Savers
Exchange until 1996, which is when his interest in seed saving and starting a
seed company really began in earnest.
In 1998, Jeremiath issued his own seed catalog. Now,
other gardeners were perusing the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Catalog. Jeremiath printed 550 copies of
that first catalog, which consisted of 12 black-and-white pages, offering 70
seed varieties. Customers came by word of mouth and
from advertising in rural farm magazines.
Since that time, his
business has grown by leaps and bounds - from the
early catalog circulation of 550, to the 2004 catalog, going to approximately
70,000 customers, and offering over 900 seed varieties, many of which have been
personally collected by Jeremiath during his
international travel to such countries as Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and
Mexico.
In addition, Jeremiath's Seed Company hosts two Garden Festivals each
year - April and August - attracting gardening enthusiasts from across the
nation. And in March of 2003 Jeremiath's
newest venture, The Heirloom Gardener Magazine, published its Premier Issue! The Magazine has received an overwhelmingly enthusiastic
response from other heirloom gardeners and those who share this young man's
dedication to preserving our food heritage.”
And that’s how we got our okra from Burma. Jere went over
there and found it.
I have noticed this over and over through the years. There is something about homeschooling
which releases the talents of the young people. They are not held
back emotionally and intellectually as they often are in institutional
schooling. I
cannot define it exactly, but I know that is the case. I have seen it in
4-H meetings where the homeschoolers are eager and involved while the public
school students are passive and hold back.
And I have seen it in life, where public school
grads seek to move on to some other institution and homeschool grads seek to
make things happen.
Like homeschooler Jeremiath Gettle. He’s not just trying
to make money. He’s
trying to make a difference.