When you try to create a beautiful, sprawling permaculture garden with guys you meet in jail, it might not look like the glossy design handbook.
“Do we hafta do shmarden hours today?” one of the guys in our drug and alcohol recovery home complained when we first started the garden.
This skinny young man in his early twenties, with a pale shaved head and big ungroomed beard — who, for the purposes of this story, asked to be called “Doctor Drangus” — had spent the last two years, before detoxing and starting his recovery, on the streets of our Skagit Valley here in rainy Northwest Washington. He slept inside clothing donation bins at gas stations and tweaked out on crystal meth in the forest. He’d spend days in the woods carving sticks into little figurines with bugged-out eyes, squatting with a hunting knife, paranoid of all the noises he’d hear in the trees.
via Gangsters, Swastikas, Tweakers and Permaculture – Modern Farmer.