"You must BE the change you wish to see in the world." -M. Ghandi "...grow your solution..." -J. Salatin I grew up in a garden. My earliest memories outdoors are of grass and dirt between my toes, drinking from a sprinkler fitting on a garden hose that my mom was using to water the tomatoes, lettuce, zucchini, broccoli, and whatever else she had planted in our backyard garden. I remember the garden mesh fence being taller than me, being amazed at the ingenuity of planting an open bottomed milk-jug mouth down into the earth next to a plant to water the roots deep below in the heat of summer. Black-widow spiders had to be killed on sight so that my little brother couldn't be bit. There was life, danger, and mostly good hard work in that 20'x30' plot. Now that I have my own family, I realize why my mom wanted to grow our own produce. At the end of the day, its only so satisfying doing office work, and its a beautiful thing bringing in dinner from the back door. Its practical, elegant, and powerful. Gardening is harnessing the primal forces of nature... sun, rain, earth, air... and nurturing the lives of little sprouting, flowering, rooting, spreading, fruiting, reproducing things. The most elegant machines in creation, they literally make food out of thin air and light. So why doesn't everybody do this?! It seems wild that lawn-care is an entire profession in this country. Isn't that what ungulates are for? I rent AND live in the city so, for now, I'll have to settle for stewarding little green things rather than hairy ones that can keep my grass cropped. I suppose not everyone has watched documentaries like Fresh, or seen youtube interviews of Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm in Virginia. I have, and I'm infected with his technical agrarian poetry. In a word, I must grow.