TACOMA, Wash. — When Kelda Miller finishes work, she rides around Puyallup, Wash., tending vegetable beds at offices, a church, some apartment blocks. In season, she'll pick fruit or greens, then head to her Sumner, Wash., home to a garden filled with enough produce for her to sell from her bicycle trailer on weekends.

What's unusual about Miller is that none of the spaces where she gardens are hers. Her gardens are on other people's land, the fruit she picks on other people's trees. It's called guerrilla gardening — and it's legal, productive and surprisingly easy to do.

"I grew up in South Hill, and wanted to encourage people to live in downtown Puyallup (by growing) more gardens," says Miller, 30.

Other reasons for guerrilla gardening are obvious from her chamomile-scented kitchen: a food cupboard that supplies herbs and fresh or canned produce year-round for little cost. Miller also is a renter, without permanent land of her own.

There are other reasons to guerrilla garden: beautifying unloved land, growing food for the hungry, building up soil.

It's fairly simple to do: Just ask landowners if they mind you improving their garden, picking their fruit or taking a cutting.

She works at Mother Earth Gardens, teaches permaculture (a system that maximizes yield through plant diversity and organic techniques) and is building a garden-design consultancy.

The 1-acre property she gardens in exchange for tenancy is evocative of both permaculture and the haphazard nature of guerrilla gardening.

Beds sit at random, vegetables intermingling. Shade-loving berries nestle under enormous fruit trees.

There are chicken and goat runs, two homemade greenhouses for seedlings and cuttings, and a huge amount of wild-looking horsetail everywhere — "it makes a great biodynamic tea," says Miller.

Some of it is untended. Miller's tenancy is expiring next month and she'll have to leave it behind. It's all completely messy but very productive.

Her other gardens are in a similar state: Two have just been tilled by their owners, who were inspired to create their own gardens.

Another is filled with weeds: "I eat a lot of weeds," Miller says.

That's the essence of guerrilla gardening, Miller explains. Gardens you don't own can be taken away at any point. Plants have to be tough in poor soil, which is why edible weeds such as dandelion and nettle are so useful.

Still, the end results are less ephemeral. Miller now has the knowledge to grow or glean enough food to share and sell. Bit by bit, she and other guerrilla gardeners are educating other people to cultivate land.

"My new landlord is excited about me gardening," says Miller. "She really wants to be educated. Not everyone wants that."