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Konnie LeMay / Lake Superior Magazine
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Ellen Sandbeck and Kiwi hang out in her comfortably (not obsessively) clean rural home near Duluth.
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By Ann Treacy
Ellen Sandbeck didn’t set out to be a nationally published environmental writer. “It happened,” she admits, “by accident.”
It began during decades of landscaping in California with her husband, Walt, where they used non-toxic, safe methods.
Often those ways proved more effective than harsh chemicals. (Bug sprays, after all, kill pests and the bugs that eat them).
Because their methods worked, demand grew for their services without touting them as “green” (not even being a buzz word at the time).
The couple moved to Duluth in 1984. In the 1990s, inspired by the promise of a grant, Ellen wrote an organic landscaping book for a local gardening group. When the grant didn’t materialize, she published the book herself, creating, as she says, “a family financial crisis.”
She doggedly marketed the book and after three years thought it was done … until she got a phone call.
Now, many writers hustle for years to solicit publishers. Ellen’s path to major publishing was more casual.
“I was in the bathroom when my husband said, ‘I just took a call for you from someone who says that she’s a New York agent who wants to represent your book.’”
Ellen laughed because she hadn’t sent anything to agents or publishers. This must be her prankster friend. “It’s just Bob playing a joke.”
But an East Coast agent had called (the area code proved it). She bought a copy of Ellen’s Slug Bread and Beheaded Thistles at a gardening center and liked it. She persuaded Ellen that her offer was real and then represented the book and sold it in a bidding auction between eight large publishing houses. Ellen followed that first book with another gardening book, Eat More Dirt.
Green Housekeeping, a paperback version of her latest work, will be released in December.
Ellen admits that the publishers probably could not have found someone less qualified … or more determined. Ellen has an art degree from the University of California-Santa Barbara. Gardening was her thing; housekeeping was not.
“People have always asked me for natural, safe and organic ways to deal with garden weeds and pests. So when Scribner Publishing House requested a book on organic housekeeping, the more I thought about it, the more excited I became to research it.”
When she told her friends about the project, with that word, “housekeeping,” they exploded in laughter. They knew Ellen.
You should know that Ellen keeps household worms. She tells businesses, schools and families how to employ worms to compost table scraps. Worms in a box in your basement (or outside) rid the world of food waste and organic trash without confining it in plastic bags and cramming it into landfills. Ellen’s worms have eaten almost whole pairs of jeans.
She and Walt have two children, Dmitri, now 22, and Ariadne “Addie,” 19. When she was asked to write the housekeeping book, their lives were, as Ellen says, messy. “Landscaping is messy, kids are messy, worms are messy, artwork is messy.”
“I don’t vacuum for fun,” Ellen confesses. “But I do care deeply about the effects of what we do on the environment, water and wildlife.”
Her 420-page book, which like her other books is engagingly written in a witty style intended to win over skeptics and inform believers, focuses on non-toxic timesaving techniques to help people clean less but smarter. In addition to reading and research, Ellen interviewed good housekeepers, bad housekeepers and held focus groups. She assisted at several “housekeeping interventions” and helped folks dig themselves out of housekeeping holes. Once she assisted a family in clearing five outbuildings packed with generations of stuff.
She practiced what she was learning. Her own home went from requiring about a year to clean for a party to needing only an hour.
Organic Housekeeping, the original hardcover version of Green Housekeeping, is such fun reading that you have to remind yourself it’s a reference book. Practical and not squeamish about what happens in a household, it tells how to clean a rug with snow and how to discourage sewer rats from swimming into a toilet. Advanced advice explains how to neutralize acids or bases should you pour chemical cleaner down the drain.
“She’s on a mission,” says Beth Wareham, Ellen’s editor at Simon & Schuster. “When I’m looking for somebody to publish, I look for someone with the kind of hold on their subject that she has. Ellen can talk about organics, worm farming, politics and environmental issues until the sun sets. She’s incredibly enthusiastic, but mostly she’s funny. The green movement itself isn’t very funny. I respond to her funniness.”
Beth’s favorite Ellen tip is to wipe down the shower after each use. “It takes only seconds. That’s Ellen, she’s all about integrating little moves into your life that take only seconds so there are no more big Saturday cleanups.
“There is obvious deep thought behind her humorous voice as Ellen suggests you might like to do things other than cleaning, that your home need not be strafed with chemicals, and that rather than being super clean, embracing some dirt in your life might be fine. It could even make you stronger.”
The Sandbecks, whose children are grown and gone, live out of town with dogs Kiwi and Tulie (Tallulah), seven chickens and countless red wiggler worms. They practice what Ellen preaches with organic techniques in vegetable gardens, a young orchard of apple and plum trees and a berry garden of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and black currants.
“Ellen is a zealot who eats, breathes and lives her message,” says her editor. “But what I love is the way she transmits it. It’s not about doing it because you’ll save money or because it’s good for the planet. This is really a lifestyle book, about living an easier, kinder, more pleasurable life.”
Ellen's Tips
1. Quick clean the floor with a damp rag pushed with a Dutch Rubber Broom, a long-handled floor squeegee with a rubber rake on one side.
2. Clean squashed bugs off windshield, headlights, chrome or car paint with a paste of baking soda and water.
3. Kill weeds in the cracks of your driveway with a spray of full-strength white distilled vinegar while in full sun, or pour boiling water on them.
4. Repel critters from feasting on your garden by setting out a bowl of ammonia or several ammonia-soaked sponges near animal entryways. (Most mammals hate that smell.)
5. Polish furniture with an oil made by shaking one part lemon juice and two parts olive oil in a jar.
“Ask Ellen” your questions at www.lavermesworms.net.
Ann Treacy is a Duluth writer who cleans her house whether it needs it or not. Annually.