PrintAttack your Front Lawn?
This NYT article briefly discusses architect Fritz Haeg's _Edible_Estates:_Attack_on_the_Front_Lawn_, a book on the progressive concept using one's front yard -- not backyard -- as a vegetable garden.
I'm not a homeowner yet, but I envision my "attacked" front lawn with a cornstalk fence along the property line, a Common Fig flanking each side of the house, a grapevined trellis over the front door, bush-sized herb plants in boxes, bright colors popping from red pepper plants, eggplant and yellow squash (summer), red cabbages, varicolored pumpkins (fall) and just to thumb my nose at Monsanto . . . two huge boxes full of dandilion plants for salad greens.
How would you "attack" your front yard?
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16 Comments:
To be clear, this is hypothetical. Many people do not wish to put gardens in their front yard because they prefer conventional aesthetics. No problem. And if you live in a community with a homeowner's association, some condition, covenent or restriction in your deed might limit or even forbid your front yard "attack."
Susquehanna at 12:49PM on 03/21/08
It's always fun to imagine. If your HOA won'ts allow a vegetable garden, you could always put an herb garden, mixing culinary with nedicinal herbs. Landscaped properly, they could be just as beautiful as traditional landscape plants.
beth1 at 1:06PM on 03/21/08
I'm not a homeowner (yet) either but I have been attacking my apt.patio with Tomatoes, peppers & fresh herbs (basil, rosemary, thyme, chives & mint) for a few years now. I usually have stuff to give away and some of the (ahem) "less culinary" neighbors think I'm a bit off when I hand em a bag of fresh herbs. A soon as I get a house I want a sunroom(we live in denver so "outside citrus" isn't an option) with minature citrus (meyer lemon, oranges, some limes) I'd probably have an apple tree, cherry tree if at all possible as well, not sure if figs would grow here but wouldn't that be nice? I'd also like bees and a goat oh and a chicken or two for fresh eggs. Man, (reality hitting) I'm gonna have to move out of town! Can you say....Hello I'm livin in a fantasy world?
bisbee at 1:09PM on 03/21/08
@bisbee--you passes "sunroom" about 4 trees ago. How about starting your own Biodome?
beth1 at 1:44PM on 03/21/08
I've seen some beautiful (to me) herb and vegetable front yards. I can see for some it may be too busy or earthy.
Where I live, I'd be scared to put anything I'd consume in the front yard. I'm sure people's back yards get attacked by wandering neighborhood wildlife, but the front yard would be like the frontline. I've watch from my window people letting their dogs poop in our lawn and walk away w/o cleaning up, or let them loose so they're running around digging stuff up.
It would be cool to be somewhat self-sustaining and enjoy the aesthetics of a large herb, vegetable, fruit, and flower garden.
Cassaendra at 2:58PM on 03/21/08
These are beautiful ideas, all of them. I've always had a fantasy of an English-cottage style garden, sprawling around the entire house (the house of course would be an adorable thatched cottage which means the roof would probably leak but anyway) with not only a formal kitchen garden in a square but all sorts of fruits and vegetables and herbs interspersed with the flowers et al.
The one down-side to a garden in the front of the house is the car exhaust fumes. My neighbor recently put in a herb garden at the end of his driveway, very nicely done with little wood-stick labels and rocks surrounding it all - I watch as his car starts and the fumes pour directly out onto it! (Aside from the usual traffic . . .)
Of course why worry about this small matter. The gardens in the back yard are more subject to animals peeing on them, so it's choose your poison perhaps.
Agriculture.
It's an adventure. :)
Karen Resta at 3:00PM on 03/21/08
@ beth LOL.."bisbee's biodome"!! love it! I forgot to put the cherry tree & apple/ fig outside. oops.
@ karen- maybe your neighbor thought he was off-setting his carbon by planting next to the driveway? (wink!)
bisbee at 4:52PM on 03/21/08
Hah! Yes. Six little herb plants that will change the world as we know it.
But listen, you guys forgot something. (Or at least the guy did who wrote the book.)
Aquaculture. Every front-yard sustenance garden needs a little pond to grow fish in. If there is no pond, a large standing plastic swimming pool might be used! (Obviously it would have to be tastefully draped with moss and ivy for good effect.)
Karen Resta at 7:14PM on 03/21/08
Okay, Susquehanna. I fell asleep thinking about your question (and for some strange reason had a really weird dream about hosting a Hollywood party where I had invented a new type of grill to make the best steak in the world which was on top of a huge refrigerator that you had to climb a ladder to get to and where there were famous artists and American Idol contestants attending all happy to engage in my planned activity of making french-fry sculptures out of a fantastic new type of play-doh I'd discovered but nevermind all that let's get to the gardening!).
White picket fence enclosing the yard and an arbor-type entranceway out of white. This would be lined with peas in the spring (sugar snap!) and grapes in the fall.
Next to the fence on the inside would be (spring) a row of leeks, a row of spinach, then a row of carrots then a row or radishes.
Left hand side of the yard against the neighbor's property would be brambles - raspberries, blackberries, currants and gooseberries. Right hand side of the yard would be lettuces of all sorts, which would be planted by variety to grow for as long as possible. Here would also be kale and beets for when the lettuce was done growing.
Up against the house potato vines, cucumbers, zucchini, melons and when the season got cooler, pumpkins and acorn squash.
In the left hand corner of the intersection of the fence in the front on the left side (the berry side) would be a triangular rounded section planted with corn (with beans to climb it bien sur!) (there would also be a peach tree here) and on the right hand side in the same rounded outcropping would be the tomatoes and peppers together (where there would also be a plum tree).
A knot garden filled with herbs smack dab in one center of the front yard and a pool filled with trout in the other side of the front yard.
Lots of marigolds planted around to keep unwanted pests away, lots of different colored lilies in groups here and there, a sprawling rose bush or two or three, and of course decorative tall grasses and other things.
Aside from that a lilac tree at my bedroom window and a gardenia bush at the front of the garden gate.
Now all I need is an automatic shovel that will work on its own.
Oh yeah. And a well-trained German Shepard to patrol it all. :)
Karen Resta at 8:28AM on 03/22/08
@Karen Resta: Holy dream description. You cracked me up. You really fell asleep thinkin' about this, eh? All those thoughts paid off; your attacked front lawn works really well.
Very practical in it's attention to pest control and using the corn-bean duo is a great idea. The beans enrich the soil with nitrogen, yes? Similarly, I'd incorporate squash into that corn-bean zone to create the "Three Sisters" troika, which is what the Native Americans did.
Man. Maybe our true calling was landscape architecture. Thinking about this is fun. Creating something like it would be better, though. I need some good weather, a house and some yard to work with . . . .
Susquehanna at 10:55AM on 03/22/08
My husband and I are currently attacking our front lawn by removing most of it. Our challenge is replacing it with a deer resistant garden so that sort of limits the fruit and vegetable gardening I can do in the front. I’ve planted herbs the deer won’t eat, like rosemary, lavender, and ornamental sage. But the back yard is fenced so that presents more opportunities for growing edibles. We have citrus, apple, apricot, and persimmon trees. We always have an herb garden. Last summer we grew lettuces, beets, several different varieties of tomatoes, peppers, summer squash, and a volunteer pumpkin vine that grew out of the compost pile. We plan on doing that again. (Well, maybe skip the sprawling volunteer pumpkin, that thing took up a lot of space.) I hope to win the battle of the lemon cucumber with the raccoons. They would not stop digging up that struggling little plant. I took pity on it and consigned it to the compost pile.
This is my first post. I love this site and enjoy reading everyone’s questions and comments. But now it’s time to get out in the garden.
Gardener at 2:05PM on 03/22/08
@Gardener: You are actually attacking your front lawn! This is so encouraging. The NYT article and Haeg's book impressed me because I'm on the cusp of lawn/home ownership and need good leads on how to landscape. And, well, by vocation, I'm often considering land use management (but won't bore people by going into that . . . ).
In the least, medicinal herbs (as recommended by beth1) and vermin-resistent culinary herbs (mentioned by you) will appear in my front yard.
And I'll transfer many of Karen Resta's attacked front yard ideas to my backyard. Good stuff.
Susquehanna at 9:44AM on 03/24/08
Okay, late to this, but it is not a hypothetical. I live in Canada, in a house on a hill that has like, a foot of decent soil over endless amounts of gravel, so it's tough to keep things watered. (aka terrible growing conditions.) Has that stopped us from attempting to turn out front lawn in to a berry orchard? Nope.
Oh, the neighbours probably think we're nuts, but just wait until it all starts to realy flourish. Imagine - get home from work, grab a handful of red currants, or blackberries, or gooseberries, or raspberries, or Siberian honey berries... There is also rhubarb in the front. (The sad veggie garden is in the back where there is a little more protection from rabbits and no sloping hill.)
What I'm trying to say is it can be done, even in crappy condition. Of course, we don't have any sort of neighbourhood lawn police and everyone here is far too polite to say anything, so it works.
Just think - I'll have fresh fruit when the revolution comes and they won't! (Kidding...)
Peasantwench at 12:58PM on 03/26/08
I'll pitch a tent in your front yard to guard your berries for you when the revolution comes and they're all trying to come in for a few bites (if you'll share with me!), Peasantwench.
Susquehanna, your mention of land management reminded me of something I recently saw in a magazine - it was a wrap-around front and side surface for trailer homes made of cherry-colored wood slats. It altered the look of a usual trailer into something which more closely resembled one of the better-designed pre-fabs. This idea could be used on a regular home also, as additional support for climbing vines. More grapes! (Wine, anyone?)
I've only really had a garden once, a long time ago. I did have a one and a half acre man-made pond more recently though - which was stocked with bluegill, trout and bass. The idea of aquaculture is truly an appealing one to me (it is much less work than gardening heh heh).
Karen Resta at 1:37PM on 03/26/08
I learned about the NYT article (i.e. see the blue hotlink in the original post) via a A Hunger Artist.
It's a blog maintained by the astute Bob DelGrosso, a former CIA instructor and current chef-in-residence at Hendricks Farm & Dairy in Pennsylvania.
Susquehanna at 4:19PM on 04/18/08
If anyone actually wondered, I am the commenter "citqs" on delGrosso's blog who envisioned the same "attacked front yard" as stated in the original S/E post above. I will happily field any inquiries into the intellectual rights to the stated commentary.
And, yes, my lawyer-brain is working overtime today.
Susquehanna at 12:45PM on 04/20/08