"I'm a bit of an oddity in my Rodgers Forge neighborhood because I've dug up part of my front yard and turned it into a small, crowded vegetable garden. I started the garden because I find digging in the dirt therapeutic and I like fresh salad greens, tomatoes, and basil. But I've also used the little plot to teach my kids and their friends (and their friends' parents) a little about super-local agriculture, soil critters, and plant varieties.

"One afternoon last weekend I was dealing with a tenacious pot of peppermint that had survived the winter. (The clay pot did not.) I decided to rip the plant apart at the roots, replant it in some old pots I had lying around, and give it to my son's friends, these 7- and 8-year-old boys. As I was repotting the plant, one of the boys asked me a confounding question.

" 'Do they call that mint because it smells like mint?' he asked, as if "mint" was some artificial flavoring he'd encountered only through Orbit or Crest.

"Researchers and environmentalists worry that young people suffer from a "nature-deficit disorder," but consequences of this separation from the outdoors are probably far greater than we realize right now. Look closely at the news headlines and you'll quickly realize that our kids will need to know something about nature and agriculture to thrive in the future. We're facing a food crisis and an expanding global population. We're facing climate change, with a good deal of greenhouse gases coming from agriculture. We face an energy crisis, in a country that trucks its food an average of 1,500 miles from field to plate. We're facing a loss of biodiversity, both off the farm and on it, in terms of a loss of plant varieties. And amid all of this, over the past 50 years we have seen food production come under the control of fewer and fewer farmers.

"That afternoon, I took my son and his friends out to the yard, picked a handful of spearmint, and said, "This is mint." Then I showed them chocolate mint, then mountain mint, then peppermint -- all with slightly different menthol tones. I reached over to a clump of wild garlic, picked off a pungent stem, and held it up to their noses. These are smells you should recognize, I said, because you eat them all the time, and here they are growing around you.

"When the boy who asked the confounding question left that day, carrying his pot of mint, he ran into another boy who hadn't been with us that afternoon. "What's that?" the late-arriving boy said, pointing at the pot.

" 'It's mint. It's where mint comes from," my son's friend responded, very authoritatively.

"When I was their age, a farmer near my home took me out to a watermelon field at the height of summer, and as we cut up a melon with his jackknife, he talked to me about the importance of the land, air, and water. I've never forgotten that day. I don't know if I'm giving my son or his friends any useful lessons with my tiny garden. I hope it's a start."