Your Healthy Harvest Gardens team
With approximately 45 years of horticultural experience among them, they can provide expertise to help your garden grow.
Karl and Lisa
Self reliance, by learning how to grow your own food.
Improvement of your health with organic, home-grown and home-cooked food.
Improved care of and concern for the environment and your family's health, starting in your backyard.
Fun, through the joy of gardening, including family members, neighbors and your community.
Karl Burgart grew up in a large family that always had a summer garden, and he has been growing things ever since. After graduating from college, Karl served as a police officer for over seven years. Following this he owned and operated a landscape company for 13 years and expanded upon his knowledge of plants and the organic system. Currently Karl grows 45 varieties of vegetables in his garden, and his family enjoys the fruits and vegetables of his labor year-round. He has been able to reduce his monthly food bill by 75 percent! As an organic gardening enthusiast, Karl loves to convert others to the organic system. He believes we need more individual families to become “food producers”, not only for improved financial security, but also to improve the nutrition of their families. Karl smiles when he says, “My teenage daughter proclaims loudly everyday that she’s going to the grocery store. She then grabs a bucket and walks out to the backyard!”
Karl has also been involved in traditional Japanese karate for many years. www.tka-mo.com Karate is not just a hobby, but also a lifestyle. In his training and his teaching, his focus is on physical and emotional harmony. He has discovered the parallels of harmony in organic gardening as well.
Lisa Rollens is a remarkable organic gardener. Being raised in St. Louis County by middle-class suburban parents was not enough to suppress her enthusiasm for nature. After graduating from the school of agriculture at the University of Missouri, she and her husband moved to Southern Arkansas. She immediately started growing food for her family. She has lived and gardened in Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, and Ohio and in the Missouri Ozarks, where she lives today. After thirty years of gardening and an intense study of the organic system, Lisa has grown just about every fruit and vegetable possible for the zones in which she has lived. She likes to say that she was growing organic before the term “organic” was in vogue.
While in Ohio, Lisa discovered a state support group called OEFFA (Ohio Ecological Farm and Food Association) “For the first time I had a chance to be with like minded folks. I attended OEFFA conferences and learned a lot more about organics. I still go to the conferences, even though I am over 12 hours away.” Since that time Lisa has been involved with many organic gardening groups and she is passionate about this lifestyle.
At her 154 acre organic farm in southern Missouri, Lisa continues to grow food that is beneficial to healthy living. She has also incorporated Permaculture into her lifestyle. Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living which seeks to create harmony between human needs and ecological ones.
