 I'm originally from New York City, so my first experience here on Rosebud I came out as a volunteer in the community of St. Francis. I started a small little community garden there. That's how I first started growing. I was working with Carmelita Sully and Donna Adrienne, a couple local master gardeners just learning how to grow and that whole process and during that time I realized that I really love the community here and the people I made a lot of good friends and I wanted to stay and when I was looking for opportunities this garden was just getting started. They didn't have a full-time person to work the garden that summer so I just came up here and volunteered because I thought it was a really cool project and wanted to see it thrive. That first summer it was a wheat field, all the wheat was taller than me and we were running hoses like 800 feet from a fire hydrant behind the store. It was pretty rough, rough start but yeah and then by the end of the summer I ended up stepping in full time as the Futsarpti Coordinator. Growing in this environment when we first started was tricky. It had been farmed before and if you look around surrounding us that is what we converted it from so it was basically like a large conventional farm, sunflowers, soy, corn, wheat, you know those are the commodity crops that are being grown around here. When we were working this field we immediately hit tons of clay, a lot of water issues in terms of being able to keep it watered, a lot of sun issues because we'd have real long hot days that would kind of just want to burn up all of our plants and it would be like torrential downpour, hail, wind one day and then a massive hundred degree day the next day and it was it can be difficult to just figure out how to adapt and adjust and take care of the plants in such a changing environment. We just do organic methods so we don't add any herbicide or pesticide here it's just all hand weeded and then you know whatever amendments that we use for fertilizing you know like fish emulsion or straw or compost just adding things to remediate the soil. The biggest thing that was hard was weeds and Donna when she first came out saw how many Canada thistle we had and there was a lot and we still have a lot. So you know trying to treat something like that by hand without herbicide is difficult and we're still battling that but just in the short couple of years since we've been here our growing areas are actually pretty fairly weed free. Breaking prairie into a garden is it's difficult. They're different soils like all your prairie grasses and plants are made for this environment they have really deep roots they can go super deep and get your water they're going to keep your soil compact they're going to pull nutrients from way deep in the clay or the sand either one and you know a lot of modern garden plants are a little more fragile planting your tomatoes or you know your peppers or you know different things like that they're not as sturdy so you have to do a lot more amending of the soil to be able to get it to a point where they're going to be able to thrive and get the water that they need hold the soil for a couple days you know if it's gonna be real hot or windy or something like that. We do a lot of straw mulching in the season before the season after the season it will eat control moisture retention and then just adding fluffiness back to the soil you know from putting putting back that organic matter in so that's been a huge asset for us that we've used really heavily and it does help a lot in terms of moisture retention you know like un-molched roe tomatoes versus mulched we can see the difference in how often we'll have to water. We work with a couple of farmers and ranchers in town who have been willing to donate old beat-up bales to us which has been great because that's what we need you know rather than go out and you know trying to buy new bales we only need like the oldest most decomposed straw we can possibly get and that works the best for us and we use it in our compost piles and everything. There's all these connections of people that have been here a really long time working on these things slowly and I think now is just the time for it. There's enough energy around it people are really excited about it and it seems like things are taking off. We need to bring as many people into this as possible because that's going to be what is going to ultimately form the most secure food system that we can possibly build. We want to grow food and we want to grow people and grow community it's like a dual purpose to kind of lift all those things up at the same time and through each other.