Bob and Merridee's Personal Home Page

At the urging of Madonna Kimbal of the Hill Country Sun, I have decided to bring this part of the website up to date. Things have changed a little bit since I originally built this page but have had so many things going on that I have just not taken time to upgrade it and now I have been properly shamed into it and so I will try to make it interesting and will be adding some new pictures soon (We've both gained a little weight.)

We no longer live in the old white wood frame house. We ran out of water in the drought of 2000 and fixed up an old red brick house that was built on another part of the ranch in 1929 and had a creek for a water supply. It's a roomier house built in the Arts and Crafts style that was popular then and has large live oak trees in front and back. Live oaks are different from regular oak trees in that they have rounded leaves and keep their leaves all winter long and shed them a little at a time in the spring so it is never completely bare. We have a working TV now and can get several local channels from Abilene and San Angelo. No public TV, though.

Merridee is at present, a once and future herbalist (There, I got all the tenses in.) but for the past few years and probably the next few years, she has a job in town so we can continue to live in the country. She runs the seven county area Head Start and Community Action programs and has well over a hundred employees under her direction. Her heart still lies in the herbalists' world and she keeps current with all developments while running these difficult agencies. Dealing with multiple bureaucracies in order to serve the surrounding communities' interests is a challenging task to say the least.

We've had our share of ups and downs out here; a lot of free national publicity on the one hand and droughts, flooding, a tornado and invasions of grasshoppers on the other. The financial rewards of Merridee's job vs. the personality clashes that employer/employee relationships sometimes produces. We hope to eventually be able to make enough money with the garlic business that Merridee can quit the high-stress job and work at home but that doesn't look like it will happen anytime soon.

I must confess it has been very ego-gratifying to be out in the middle of nowhere, seeing few people and still get recommended by the NY Times, SF Chronicle and a several page story in the Dallas Morning News and also Food and Wine, Forbes Magazine, Texas Gardener, Organic Gardening, the American Botanical Council's Herbalgram among other magazines. I really didn't do anything but put together the website and they saw it and called me. These days I get a lot of email and phone calls and I have become the "Dear Abby" of garlic. I don't mind a bit as I really enjoy it.

Another change is that I used to sell only what I grew but now I also buy from other small organic growers across the country and sell it nationwide through the website. It works well for everybody. I think in the future, the small growers will sell directly to people nationwide through a garlic growers mall I will be putting in during the next year or two.

I have attended all the Garlic is Life Symposia and listened to the lectures of many highly qualified research scientists about garlic and have been able to learn a great deal about all aspects of garlic, especially the chemistry and health benefits of garlic directly from the researchers themselves. We spend the better part of three days together and you get to know one another rather well in that time. This was the only place they could go to be able to meet with like-minded others and discuss their work and results and now there may not be any more. Darrell Merrell, the sponsor will not be able to fund any more symposia. We all appreciate everything he has done and wish him well. Having many face to face meetings with these experts over coffee, lunch or dinner has given me not only a very good understanding of the current state of things in the garlic industry and also the ability to call each of them as friends and ask questions and discuss things as old friends rather than strangers. It is an enormous advantage at times in being able to get the latest scoop, garlicwise.

When I first started putting this website together I really didn't know much about garlic but I liked it and I enjoyed growing it. Because of the brain boosts I have been freely given by my friends in the more technical aspects of garlic, I now feel capable of discussing it with just about anyone on whatever level they want to discuss it. I have put much of the knowledge I have absorbed into the website and that has made it one of the most comprehensive and accurate garlic site on the internet. I feel good about having dissemenated as much information as I have to as many people as I have, but there is much more to be done. I feel kind of like the Johnnie Appleseed of garlic and I like it.

I would like to put together a series of seminars on the health benefits of garlic, the cooking secrets of garlic, the growing and storing of garlic and other topics for which there is interest. Garlic is growing in popularity daily and I like to think I'm doing my part to help that.

On a more personal side, I now have an 8" Dobsonian telescope and I love it. Our dark skies make astronomy a natural hobby out here. I have been visiting Paint Rock and playing my Indian flute there and saw a lot of the pictographs often enough and have figured out the meaning of some of them - they were astronomic in nature, but you would have to be an astronomer to relate to the some of the pictographs. I feel immensly proud to have figured them out and am working on more not only at Paint Rock but other pictograph (painted images) and petroglyph (carved or scratched images) sites throught the country.

For more details of what has been going on around the garlic patch, click on the yearly newsletter buttons below:

Click Here to Read the 2005 Newsletter.

Click Here to Read the 2004 Newsletter. Click Here to Read the 2003 Newsletter.

Click Here to Read the 2002 Newsletter. Click Here to Read the 2001 Newsletter.

Click Here to Read the 2000 Newsletter. Click Here to Read the 1999 Newsletter.