Cleveland landscaper Anibal Garcia diverts grass clippings and leaves from city sanitation trucks to Omowale Farm in Ohio City, where it is composted and used for fertilizer. Hoping to promote edible landscaping, farmer Hayes Rowan offers perennial plants, including lavender, lilac and strawberry plants to community members free of charge each year. He hopes the city's Senior Chores Community Service crews, and other landscapers, will participate in the project! He can be reached at 216 903 5201; Mr. Garcia, (a great landscaper,) at (216) 650 0292

The Omowale Farm features a shade garden using native plants and the farm grows Milkweed, a food source for Monarch butterflies.

Rowan quotes Chief Luther Standing Bear, (in T. C. McLuhan’s Touch the Earth): "The Old Lakota were wise. They knew that a person’s heart away from nature can become hard; they knew that lack of respect for growing, living beings soon led to lack of respect for humans too. So they kept themselves close to Mother Earth and her softening influence.”