Front-Yard Veggie Gardens

I had trouble deciding which photo to show you today! I went on a bit of a "hunt" yesterday and found a whole slew of homes in the Morningside section of Atlanta that have front-yard vegetable gardens. This little outing was inspired by a couple articles I saw in the past week that said the magic words I'm always looking to hear: "the return of Victory Gardens." Turns out more and more folks are doing away with their front lawns either because they are sick of them (the work, the chemicals) OR they simply want veggie gardens and the front yard is where the six-hours-of-daily-sun is. But just like the 60 million people nationwide who live in neighborhoods with home owner association covenants that forbid visible clotheslines for "solar drying," many neighborhoods do not allow front-yard veggie gardens, or the covenants don't mention this possibility and neighbors are in an uproar trying to decide where they stand on the issue.

As I drove around Morningside, I marveled at how tomatoes, mostly, but also swiss chard and squash vines filled whole corners of front lawns, framing the front window or the walk to the front door. The home in this photo has a pumpkin growing practically on the sidewalk in that mass of leaves. I could just imagine neighbors checking its progress on a daily basis as they walk their dogs or push strollers (okay, fine, maybe they need to push the leaves back onto the lawn). One lawn has a very formal French potager (kitchen garden) on its front lawn, complete with a central fountain and stone paths connecting four raised beds of crops.

Interestingly, there's an artist and architect named Fritz Haeg who is all over this front-yard veggie garden movement. He is currently in the middle of a project called Edible Estates, in which his team will turn nine stereotypical suburban front lawns into vegetable gardens (yards in Kansas, California and New Jersey are already done). According to the Edible Estates website:

Edible Estates is an attack on the American front lawn and everything it has come to represent.

Edible Estates reconciles issues of global food production and urbanized land use with the modest gesture of a domestic garden.

Edible Estates is an ongoing series of projects to replace the American front lawn with edible garden landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people.

Edible Estates is a practical food-producing initiative, a place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening.

I specifically like that each garden is sponsored by a local arts organization and is presented as an art installation. Also, I like that a coordinating booklet for each garden gives regionally-appropriate advice on how to plant your own edible landscape if you live in that area.

Think you might want an edible front-yard landscape? See Fritz Haeg's guidelines for consideration as a prototype in your area. Or join the front-yard gardeners in Morningside and plant some fall crops in a sunny spot where all your neighbors can see.

Front-Yard Veggie Gardens