4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: MUD BARON PLANTS WHAT HE PREACHES

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: MUD BARON PLANTS WHAT HE PREACHES:

MUD BARON PLANTS WHAT HE PREACHES

BY MARY MACVEAN, LOS ANGELES TIMES …BUT FROM THE KANSAS CITY STAR! | HTTP://BIT.LY/JMBHVE

Tue, Apr. 24, 2012 07:05 AM -- LOS ANGELES  ::   It's not easy to keep pace with the youth gardening evangelist Mud Baron - in the real world or the virtual one.
To keep up, you need to relentlessly advocate for schoolyard gardens full of food and flowers. You need to be a constant presence on Twitter. (He has more than 24,000 followers.) You need to schlep all over Southern California to collect seeds. And you need to be willing to make people mad, to push teenagers to get dirty and to nudge companies to make donations.
A bearded, baggy-pants-wearing Baron might quote Cicero, Lou Reed, Jonathan Swift or Wynton Marsalis to make a point. But he's also not above poop jokes born of the manure that feeds the gardens.
Rarely without pruners in his pocket, Baron is a rabble-rousing master gardener with a florist's touch. Or, as he likes to say, he has tattoos of Cornel West and Martha Stewart on his behind. (His girlfriend says that's not literally true.)
No school garden should fail for lack of stuff, he says, so he rustles up seeds, worm castings, compost, bulbs. Black plastic sheets from a film set become mulch liners. Last year, he says, he raised $5 million in in-kind donations.
Essentially unemployed - or at least without a regular paycheck - he works a few days a week with students at John Muir High in Pasadena, Calif., building a garden on 11/3 acres. He also spends time at a Los Angeles Unified School District science center in