• STORY HIGHLIGHTS
• Shady backyards send vegetable patches to front yard
• Some gardeners hope for more WWII-style victory gardens
• Some municipal codes limit percentage of yard that isn't trees or
grass
• Gardeners save money, make friends with shared food
NEW YORK (AP) -- A dedicated group of vegetable gardeners is ripping
out their front lawns and planting dinner.
Their front-yard kitchen gardens, with everything from vegetables to
herbs and salad greens, are a source of food, a topic of conversation
with the neighbors and a political statement.
Leigh Anders, who tore up about half her front lawn four years ago
and planted vegetables, said her garden sends a message that anyone
can grow at least some of their food. That task should shift from
agribusiness back to individuals and their communities, said Anders,
of Viroqua, Wisconsin.
"This movement can start with simply one tomato plant growing in
one's yard," she said.
While people have been growing food in their backyards forever, front-
yard vegetable gardens are a growing outlet for people whose
backyards are too shady or too small, as well as those who want to
spread their beliefs one tomato at a time.
Many hope their gardens will revive the notion of victory gardens,
which by some estimates provided 40 percent of America's vegetables
during World War II.
The topic has gotten more buzz nationally as bloggers chronicle their
experiences and environmentalists have scrutinized the effects of
chemicals and water used to grow lawns. A book called "Food Not
Lawns," published last year, inspired several offshoot groups.
Fritz Haeg, an artist and architect, has done yards in Kansas,
California and New Jersey as part of a project called "Edible Estates."
Haeg, who is working on a book, due out in 2008, called "Edible
Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn," says he's been overwhelmed by the
response. He gets hundreds of e-mails every month from people who
want to be next.
"People are obsessed with their homes, creating these cocoons that
isolate them," he said. "This project is about reaching out, getting
them connected to their streets."
Some of the neighbors are less than thrilled. Some municipal codes
limit the percentage of a yard that can be planted with anything
other than trees and grass.
"Especially in the first three years, I got a lot of code
violations," said Bob Waldrop of Oklahoma City. He planted his corner
lot almost entirely with fruit trees, berry bushes and vegetables.
"Now that the plantings have matured, it's pretty," he said. "It
wasn't so pretty the first couple years."
Shannon McBride, 47, of Huntsville, Alabama, kept grass borders
around her front-yard vegetable beds.
"We promised our neighbor we wouldn't grow corn, because that looks
kind of tacky," she said.
The neighbor also thought tomatoes looked "untidy," so McBride and
her husband are growing bell peppers, carrots, chives, herbs, two
kinds of beans, beets, okra, lettuce and cucumbers. Her corn is off
to the side of the house.
An anonymous complaint about Karen Baumann's front-yard garden in
Sacramento, California led to a fight by local gardeners against the
city's landscaping code, which stated that gardens could take up no
more than 30 percent of the front yard.
After a public hearing where Baumann's 11-year-old twin sons
testified, dressed as a carrot and a tomato, the city changed the law.
"I'm always asked, 'What will it look like in the winter?"' said
Rosalind Creasy, a landscape designer who has been writing about
edible landscaping for 25 years. "If you design it well and it has an
herb garden, it will look fine. One of the dumbest things I see is
dead lawns in the winter. They're brown for six months of the year.
How beautiful is that?"
Some front-yard gardeners say that ripping out the sod and putting in
vegetables gave the neighbors their first-ever excuse to speak to them.
"It's kind of like having a dog," said Nat Zappia, 32, a graduate
student. "No one talked to us until we had a dog."
Zappia turned the front yard of the home he and his wife rent in
Santa Monica, California, into a vegetable garden, with his
landlord's permission. He estimates it supplies 35 to 40 percent of
the food they eat.
Zappia took a master gardening class at the East Los Angeles
University of California extension program that was focused on
growing food. Other gardeners were inspired by books they've read,
such as "Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture" and "The
Year I Ate My Yard."
The gardens don't cost much to plant. Zappia estimates he spent about
$100 on the garden and says he and his wife save about $200 to $300 a
year on their food costs.
Waldrop, in Oklahoma City, said the garden's organic fruit allowed
him to eat in a way he could never afford if he bought everything at
the grocery store.
"It's like money growing in your yard," he said.
Creasy has a 1,000 square-foot edible garden that surrounds her Los
Altos, California home. Among the things she grows: Wheat, sesame,
paprika peppers and alpine strawberries.
Every July 4, as part of her neighborhood block party, she harvests
wheat, lays it down on a tarp on her driveway, covers it with a cloth
and has all the neighbors do what she calls, "the tennis shoe twist"
to thresh it.
Next, she puts it in a deep wheelbarrow and blows off the chaff with
an electric leaf blower. Then she grinds it with an attachment for
her mixer, bakes bread and serves it to the neighbors, warm from the
oven.
"It's like a sacrament," she said.
Creasy also keeps eight hens and one rooster in her yard and grows
sorrel to feed them.
"I would say they're visited at least once a day by some child," she
said. Her garden gives kids what grandparents gave children during a
more rural time, Creasy said.
"I remember my grandfather slaughtering a chicken and showing me the
insides where the egg was growing. I remember finding a potato," she
said. "There's a reality to it that sitting and watching TV and
watching video games don't have."
And it's a reality people can plant and cultivate themselves, she said.
"People tell me they went to Tuscany and ate outside under a grape
arbor," Creasy said. "Well, they can grow their own grapes in their
yard... People want meaning in their lives; you don't have to go to
Tuscany to get it."