Roots

Our first school planting took place on a cold but sunny day in March 2013, the exact date of which I can no longer recall, but the project, no, the mission of what we are doing has been incubating in the minds of those involved for months, even years before this.

It's hard to say when it started. I had known George Sinclair, now known as genHkids' Garden Coordinator, in passing for years. Like many other tweens and teens in town, I came around his place often for punk shows at Black Sheep music venue, located right next to George's famous Skanks Skates.

But even before I fell under the spell of his lush urban garden on-site at Skanks, I had been reading books about the ecology, nutrition, politics, and mechanics of growing food. Indeed, before that, it was my resolve for a vegan lifestyle that got me interested in food, and long before that I spent summers in wonder at the gardens of my grandmothers, at the strange and various plants, insects, and the wildlife that took refuge there. There's even a picture somewhere of me as a still-bald-but-walking baby with my nose plunged deep in a large red tulip. However, attempting to trace the roots of what is happening  so far would be fruitless, if not incomprehensible, so I digress.

I was out for a show the night that this idea first inched into existence. It was a hot, humid night in June or July sometime last year. The sunflowers were already standing tall above my head as I approached George to admire his garden and offer some helping hands. I started coming out to work with him on my days off. As the garden grew, so did our ideas of the great educational potential the garden could have. It was self-evident to us both that the knowledge and practice of growing food was of intrinsic value to all people who eat, especially in our modern food-corrupted world, and we resolved to share it however we could. I wrote up a few pages on our mission and made an outline for garden tours, which we would give to the punk and skater kids who came by. At the end of the season, I left to go WWOOFing in Japan, an experience chronicled here: diseasecalledman.blogspot.com. When I came back, George had hooked up with the folks at genH (genhkids.org) who were interested in what we had done and wanted to do more.

genHkids had done a few school gardens, many of which had been overgrown or destroyed by vandalism. They hired George, and took me as an intern. We took on 6 school gardens - part of genHkids Healthy Seeds project - and our first community garden, Seeds of Possibility.  For the most part, these were started from scratch this year.

That's pretty much how we started. I'll do my best keep up with where we are now, and where we go from here.

Long live the earth.

-Rox