My Natural Bed

I've been sleeping on a natural bed, of one kind or another, at home since 1980. Like Goldilocks of the fairy tale, I tried different natural beds that all had one problem or another, until I finally found one that is "just right."

NATURAL BEDS THAT DIDN'T WORK FOR ME

When I first decided I wanted to sleep on a natural fiber mattress--instead of the standard mattress made with polyurethane foam, covered with plastic synthetic fabrics, and sprayed with fire retardants--there were none available. Refusing to sleep another night on a synthetic mattress, I ended up creating my own by folding up cotton thermal blankets and putting them on a metal rollaway bed frame. As awkward and uncomfortable as this was, I slept so much better from the very first night that I've slept in a natural bed ever since.

My next bed was a used cotton innerspring mattress and box spring that I happened to find by chance, in the back room of a furniture store.

But it was just a single bed, so when I needed a bed for two, we got a three- or four-inch thick cotton futon and put it on the hardwood floor. But it was just too uncomfortable.

Then I got a wood slat bed frame, but I could feel the wood slats through the one futon. So I got another cotton futon and put it on top. But still, the cotton got denser and harder the more we slept on it, and it was very uncomfortable.

Next, we got a 100% wool mattress--big and as thick as an innerspring mattress. While we liked the wool, it was, as my husband Larry put it, "an elephant mattress." The two of us together could barely lift our queen size mattress. It also had a cotton muslin cover, which didn't last more than a few years. With normal wear, the fabric just ripped open.

THE NATURAL BED WE LOVE

I say, "the natural bed we love" because both Larry and I love this bed (and Larry has spent a lot of time sleeping and lying on it since his back injury almost eight years ago). When we travel, we are always happy to come home to our bed. It is just a cozy, comfortable bed. We've been sleeping on it for I think about ten years now.

And because Larry needs to balance his standing and sitting hours with as many lying down hours as possible, our bed is central to our life. We eat there, watch television and movies there, talk, read, and do much of what we might normally do in other parts of the house. Because of his injury, our bed is our "living room". Larry is always saying, "Let me lie down, and then..." Almost everything we do ends up in the bed.

Our bed is very different from most. Instead of one thick mattress, it is several layers of thinner mattresses, all of which can be easily lifted for sunning and airing outdoors. My friend Eliana Jantz at Shepherd's Dream developed this type of bed, after her study of traditional European beds.

I'm going to take you through all the different components of our bed, step by step, so you can see how it is put together and why we chose each part.

Wood Slat Frame

The bed frame is solid wood--some kind of knotty pine. I found it on sale in a "bedroom superstore" kind of place. It was the only wood frame in the entire store, but I fell in love with it immediately. I liked the curve and the scrollwork. It does have some unknown finish on it, but it has never had an odor and it has never been a problem. I think it had been a floor sample.

Previous to this frame, we had a solid oak bed frame that had come with slats. That frame was coming apart and the new frame had no slats, so we took the slats out of the old frame and recycled them into the new frame.

Much later, about two years ago, we added latex strips to the slats when they became available through Shepherd's Dream. The latex pads really made a difference in comfort. Not that our bed was uncomfortable before, it just became even more comfortable with the latex pads on the slats. We just glued them on with nontoxic white glue and they have been fine. (My one caution about the latex strips is that they did have a strong odor of natural latex rubber that required a good six weeks of airing outdoors before I could have them in the bedroom. But once that outgassing period passed, they have been odor-free.)

Mattress

On top of the wood slats covered with latex strips, we have a Shepherd's Dream All Wool Mattress. The description on the website says, "Many layers of wool are compressed into the double-stitched, thick woolen encasement with many equally, tight tufts. This gorgeous wool-filled mattress is a product that will be passed on to future generations. You will not need to replace your mattress in 5, 10, 20, or even 50 years." I believe this is true. Our mattress shows no wear at all after ten years. It is just as resilient as the day we bought it.

Our queen-sized mattress came in two parts so it would be light enough to lift. We just put them side-by side-in the one bed frame and we can't even tell it's two mattresses.

On top of this mattress, we have two Shepherd's Dream Mattress Mates mattress toppers. These are about three inches thick and designed just to put a layer of natural fibers next to your body.

And then, finally, on top, right under the sheets, we have a wool pile mattress pad. I bought this probably twenty years ago and have never seen another one, but I love it. It's wool shag attached to a woven wool backing. It's like sleeping on a sheepskin. I wish someone would start making these again.

Bedding

To go along with our wool mattress, we also have a wool comforter, wool pillows, and I use a wool-filled neck roll. We also have a wool blanket, which we put on top of the comforter on those few chilly nights here in Florida when the temperature gets down into the forties.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we decided to get new pillows for the bed. It had been a while since we had purchased our last wool sleep pillows. Though they continue to be comfortable, the pillows do tend to compact over time and lose their loft. Both Larry and I were delighted with the puffy new pillows. We were surprised how much better we slept with the new pillows from the very first night with them.

We have been sleeping on 100% cotton flannel sheets every night for years. We sleep on flannel sheets all year long, even during our six months of summer when the nighttime temperature doesn't go below eighty degrees. We find them to be much more absorbent than percale sheets--the flannel actually helps keep our bodies cooler and more comfortable because they wick away perspiration. While we haven't yet purchased organically grown cotton sheets, we probably will soon as the bed linens we currently have wear out. We did just need to replace our comforter cover, and purchased one made of organically grown cotton. It's very soft.

Cotton bedding does wear more quickly than polyester. With use, the fabric gets thinner and thinner until it just rips. We reuse any salvageable parts of sheets and pillowcases for rags or other uses. We just love the feel of soft well-washed cotton flannel.

Even our teddy bears are wool! They are made from reclaimed scraps leftover from making sheepskin seat covers for automobiles.

WHY I CHOSE SHEPHERD'S DREAM FOR OUR NATURAL BED

I've known Eliana Jantz, founder of Shepherd's Dream, since 1984, when I was writing my first book, Nontoxic & Natural. At that time she was selling an instruction manual for the traditional technique for making futons and easy wood-slat frame designs, plus the necessary materials and equipment for making futons. As I got to know Eliana, I learned that even then she was being typically Eliana and doing things according to her own vision--when everyone else was selling ready-made futons, she was empowering her customers to make their own. Over the years I've watched her business grow and change as she has continued to perfect and "push the envelope" both in innovative bed design and the sustainability of materials, business, and community.

Shortly after I first met her, Eliana fell in love with wool, and found it to be the perfect material for making healthy beds. "I actually stumbled upon my love for wool," says Eliana. "I was already in love with the simplicity of the hand made cotton futon, however, through years of trial and error, I discovered that the typical North American futon made from cotton was an incorrect design.

"In Japan, where cotton futons are commonly used for sleeping, they are only 2 inches thick, are placed on a breathable surface, and aired during the day--every day--resulting in a continual state of 'dry'--the key factor of a healthy natural fiber mattress.

"The four- to six-inch cotton futons typically made here are too thick to be an effective full time mattress because cotton--a plant fiber--absorbs moisture quickly and releases it very slowly, losing the ability to insulate against cold, in fact intensifying the cold. Add the warmth of summer to this perpetual state of moisture and you have the perfect environment for the growth of mold and mildew.

"Then I learned that wool handles moisture much more effectively than cotton, or any other plant fiber. That's when I began on my journey with wool, creating wool bedding and eventually replacing all our cotton batting with wool. This was a godsend in our search for a more ideal bedding material.

"In the past four years, as I've been living a little closer to nature. I'm learning that with moisture conditions always close at hand, and especially in the winter when the moisture intensifies the cold, wool fiber is literally a 'life saver.' When evening comes and I turn towards night, nothing seems more appropriate to me than to lay on a bed of wool. Wool 'wicks' the moisture away into the air keeping us dry and warm. Wool doesn't lose its ability to insulate even when wet. This is an amazing feature of wool and I believe it's a big reason we all love it! I recently sloshed in the wintery meadows here in Montague, and did not have the right foot wear. My feet got soaked and I expected my feet to start getting really cold. But I was wearing thick wool socks and my feet stayed toasty, so I continued trudging about with wet but warm feet for hours more."

[When I was reading this to Larry--in bed, of course--he said, "Oh, I know why cotton absorbs and holds moisture and wool repels it! It's because wool is from an animal and by design it's purpose is to keep the animal warm and dry. But cotton is a plant, and the purpose of its fiber is to bring life-sustaining water into the plant and keep it hydrated.]

One of the things I greatly admire about Eliana is that when the materials she wanted to use weren't available, she took the initiative to make them herself. Eliana's dissatisfaction with commercially grown and processed cotton batting led to her collaboration with one of the first California based organic cotton growers and an Oakland, California garnetting mill to make their first certified organic cotton batting. When she switched to wool and wanted wool grown to specific sustainable standards, she went out into her local farm community, met the woolgrowers and developed a program with them to not only improve the quality and purity of the wool, but make woolgrowing a viable and sustainable business for the shepherds. Eliana initiated the still successful Pure Grow Wool Program with Sonoma County Woolgrowers in 1993, by developing a criteria for sustainable and responsible wool production practices (and then she hired me to write them up). This wool is considered some of the finest in the natural bed industry.

Eliana and I share a passion for the principle of sustainability having to do with living locally, in ways appropriate to one's bioregion. In addition to the quality and purity of the materials in her beds, when I purchased my wool bed, hers was a business local to me. At the time I lived in rural Marin County, just north of San Francisco, and her business was in an almost rural part of Sonoma County, the next county north. It was about an hour's drive on a little backcountry road through rolling hills to get to her showroom. I liked the fact that the wool came from sheep raised right there in Sonoma County...sheep that were part of the landscape as I drove through those rolling hills. I liked that my mattress, like all the others, were handsewn by local women (some of them at home), rather than being produced in a factory. For me, sleeping on this mattress, with my head on this pillow, under this comforter connected me with the nature of the land and the whole ecosystem in which I lived.

Eliana has taken that concept of local production even further in the last few years. In 2002, I had the pleasure of being present at the grand opening of her new facility in Montague, California, a small town at the foot of Mount Shasta. Here I visited the sheep in the fields and their shepherd, took a tour of the mill where the wool is made into batting, and then slept on a mattress in the room where it was made...all within a few miles of each other...all within view of the majestic snow-capped mountain.

Shepherd's Dream has grown from a business to a project making a model community of sustainable living that includes the basic components of shelter, food and production of healthful and needed products and services within the structure of a live/work cottage industry. "Fundamental to the entire project," says Eliana, "is an ongoing review of what it is that inspires and sustains the spirit within the activities of a community, by doing work that the participants find worthwhile within a world view. The project is meant to inspire, educate and guide humanity into a new paradigm for a sustainable and inspired way of living."

The first task was to buy and renovate the beautiful, old, brick building in downtown Montague that now houses the woolbed operations and showroom downstairs, and upstairs is home to Eliana and her partner, architect and builder Bob Davidson. Eliana herself truly does now live and work in the same building.

Other adjoining structures covering four downtown lots are continuing to be remodeled to house other employees and their families involved with the various aspects of the project.

Eliana and Bob were drawn to the tiny, almost forgotten, town of Montague because it had recently become the chosen location for Patrick Holland's Woolgatherers Carding Mill (carding is the process of brushing the wool fibers with wire teeth to align them). Patrick, a Montegue shepherd, had purchased and assembled the mill during the winter of 2001/2002 to satisfy the need for wide-width quality wool batting for the making of Shepherd's Dream's 100% wool products. The equipment came from Mt. Jefferson Woolen Mill in Oregon when its doors closed the previous April. After Patrick's passing in 2004, ownership of the Mill was handed on to Nathon Thill, a spirited young man who had worked closely with Patrick and demonstrated great vision and ability.

The wool carded in the mill is purchased directly from domestic woolgrowers at premium prices. The EcoDomestic Wool Project, co-founded by Eliana and Patrick, is a collaboration whose purpose is to help build the infrastructure for reviving and stabilizing our domestic wool industry. This involves establishing a standard for sustainable growing and identity for domestically produced wool in the marketplace.

Another aspect of this sustainable community project is the creation of a cooperative vegetarian cafe to serve their immediate community. The plan is to coordinate their collective efforts in nourishing themselves with healthy meals made with homegrown vegetables and fruits as much as possible, while they continue to grow as a community. As I write this, the cafe is just about to begin cooking meals for the participants and guests of the Project. In the back of the cafe, they are preparing a beautiful, spacious bed and breakfast room, as a respite for weary travelers and a place where anyone can experience the wonder of sleeping on a wool bed. The cafe will serve produce from the Shepherd's Dream 38-acre organic farm--a gift from Mary Lilly, an organic farmer for 73 years. Mary was inspired by the desire of the community to grow their own food, and chose to leave her land and farm to the project when she passed on in June of 2005.

The latest project from Shepherd's Dream is 'felting' wool. "We wet the wool, roll it up, and stomp it with our feet it until it felts into a stable wool pad," says Eliana. "It has already found many uses in our lives. We use it as a 'heating pad' on winter nights, as a super compact travel bed, exercise pad, a baby change pad, baby's first bed, carseat covers and the list goes on." So inspired is Eliana by the potential of wool to help and heal, that she intends to develop The Shepherd's Dream World Woolbed Project, a nonprofit organization to distribute a felted woolbed that would protect and nurture humans in various extreme conditions worldwide, including environmental disasters, refugee migrations, third world poverty conditions, and other medicinal and emergency applications.

Eliana continues to be inspired by the practical, comforting, healing, and healthful aspects of wool. By bringing her loving attention to every aspect of production--from the earth, to the animals, the woolgrowers, all the production workers, her community, and the comfort and health of her customers, she has made Shepherd's Dream a shining example of sustainable business.

To me, my natural bed is more than a healthy place to sleep. It also embodies the elements of the earth and the values of everyone who made it. It contains the mountain and the sheep and the sun and the rain and loving hands. It is a product of sustainability in action.

Eliana and her sister Janet

(not present are Terri - special sewing projects, Dae - fabric cutter, Phil and Valerie Peck - frame builders, Mo - farm groundskeeper, Tony - millwright)