HOA says nah
Finally a good use of the “front yard”.
Front yards are for block parties but nowadays everyone just hates everyone so they go home and close the shades./jk
Back yards work well to for block parties
Imagine living in america and having laws about your garden.
Buy a house not in a HOA. Problem solved. I grow stuff in my front yard every year
You will all eat VERY VERY well for about 2 weeks out of the year.
You will have 1 month where you struggle to consume way too much of one single vegetable every week and you will dread having to find different recipes to use ot all up.
Right now I have about 16 very large cucumbers. I don’t even like pickles that much.
My 15 yo daughter eats cucumbers like apples, she would mow through those 16 in one week.
I think you gave birth to a rabbit.
Disgusting! I hope to never live to see such horrific living conditions in MY America /S
Feed your neighbours?
That amount of land is unlikely to feed a single person, let alone their neighbours.
https://fincatierra.com/journal/how-much-land-to-feed-a-person
Who’s to say that they’re only gardening on this single plot of land? Why not plant a food forest in your front and back yard, and coordinate with your neighbors to have the whole neighborhood build a food coop?
Also, how do you get “feed your neighbor every single calorie they will ever need” out of this meme? You’re literally just loading a whole bunch of extra baggage onto a simple point that we should be growing and sharing food for our community. There’s no reason to make perfect the enemy of good.
I live in a town that is experiencing significant growth. The plot of land across the street from me had one house on it, it was torn down and they’re building four in its place. My own house sits on two lots, so I have an above average amount of land for this suburban town. My yard, all told, is 8-10 times the size of what is pictured above.
I couldn’t grow a year’s worth of side dishes for myself on my land, if I knocked down every tree and shrub and replaced them with something productive. I do some backyard gardening, I can a year’s worth of jelly (in fact that’s a project for this coming week) and I raise a summer’s worth of peppers and tomatoes.
Feed your neighbours the occasional veggie during summertime.
I miss giant zucchinis. The groundhogs have defeated everyone in my neighborhood.
Removed by mod
“Anarchy under the umbrella of a very authoritarian system.”
Arguably, “Socialism under the umbrella of a very authoritarian barely-socialist system.”
A scientist would tell you this is bad data. Arguably good propaganda, but bad science.
Wild to me that Americans aren’t allowed to do this
Americans entirely do this. It really just depends where you live
The US is a big place. Whether or not you’re allowed to do this depends on where you live.
Yeah, but I’ve been told America is the Land of the Free, not Land of the Free, some conditions apply. Not applicable in certain jurisdictions. Check with your doctor if you are in an area free enough to grow a garden.
It’s land of the fee
“Land of the free” has only ever been propaganda. Free to sell your body and soul to a capitalist or starve to death under a bridge. Wow, what freedom.
I went to Portland, OR about a year ago, and wandered aimlessly for a couple hours before concluding that Portland is the world capital of front-yard gardening.
Yeah, for example, Earthships are more difficult to build here in Europe (regulations…) than in, for example, New Mexico where they originated.
It can get overly complicated. there’s so many random laws that basically you give up. Like I have a tiny garden in the back yard, which won’t give you issues; but the front yard can result in a $250 daily fine if it’s not to their liking. I had to cut off part of my driveway, which everyone else has, so my lot can be more “herbaceous” because someone (neighbor that has a tree cutting company, salty cunt) across the street called the city about me trimming a tree so a branch so it didn’t fall on my roof. I made sure to get the shittiest invasive grass you can get.
In Massachusetts near Boston I do not have to deal with any of that shit so my front yard looks exactly like this.
As Sam wrote, HOAs are terrible. I thought I escaped by moving only to have the city do the same, sigh. Bonus points: I have a old oak tree that’s half dead, can’t be cut down because it’s “protected” and it’s destroying my foundation and driveway. But the next hurricane will likely topple the tree on the road and it’s their problem then since the area it’s on is “city property” so yeah you’re luck you can have a garden. I really wanted to put one in the front yard then again the tree will kill it all anyway.
I’m pretty sure that this mostly comes down to whether or not you have an HOA. HOAs are the literal devil.
More that they don’t want to, which is worse.
They are, just depends if you’re in an HOA or what the laws are if you’re within city limits. If you’re in unincorporated land then it’s pretty free and wild. Earth ships are a thing and started in New Mexico.
Hell, it even depends on the HOA. I live in an HOA and there are plenty of yards in the neighborhood like this. We have a pretty chill HOA. It doesn’t do much beyond taking care of a few communal spaces, organizing a couple of annual events like a community garage sale, and enforcing the most absolute basic of yard maintenance requirements. (A well-tended garden on the front yard is perfectly fine. Turning your yard into a junkyard or having three foot high grass in your front yard isn’t. You can do what you want with your property, it just needs to be clean and intentional. You could convert your whole yard over to zero-maintenance clover, and that would be perfectly fine.)
And that’s the kind of HOA I like. I do want my neighbors to maintain their properties. I want people to be free to mold their homes into whatever form they want, but no one intentionally sets out to have a yard filled with junk cars or three foot high grass. People plant grass with the intention of mowing it, it just gets away from them.
If you want grass, mow it. If you want a garden, plant it and tend it. If you want the lowest environmental impact and least effort, plant clover or other low-maintenance ground cover. Do whatever you want. I don’t care. Just keep it clean and intentional. Hell, one of my neighbors keeps a giant demon skeleton in their front yard year-round. It’s weird, but it’s intentional, so it’s fine.
I don’t want to live in a neighborhood where every house is the same. I want the freedom to express myself through my home, and I want my neighbors to have the same freedom. But at the same time, I want to live in a place where people maintain their homes. I don’t care what form you maintain your home to. But I do want it maintained. Grow as big of a garden as you want, just don’t neglect it and let it get overgrown. If you just don’t have the time and resources for a lot of yard maintenance, plant something like clover. It doesn’t take a lot of effort or resources to keep a yard neat and clean.
lol I just noticed that comment after i did post a very similar comment…
But for example suburbs are indeed a little bit well… badly regulated…
Is it normal in suburbs / cities?
Normal? Probably not normal anywhere. The money and effort in farming usually isn’t offset by the production of such a small plot. It would be more of a hobby. What is more common is a dedicated space for farming within a suburban area. Typically they have a shared area and you pay monthly for your plot. Either that or some people with a green thumb in urban areas can turn their high-rise apartment into quite the greenhouse.
When it comes to feeding the masses efficiently farmland is still the dominant and most efficient method in most countries.
Depends on HOA I guess.
No need to worry about a sidewalk, there are no pedestrians in this car centric neighborhood.
Think you forgot that Madmax truck and some metal armoured raiders pillaging the garden and house until there’s nothing left. /jk
That’s a low fucking bar
Gotta start somewhere 🤷🏻
My initial thought too. Something will eventually have to happen to suburbs
No that’s how gardening looks like
Just remember that most microplastics come from tires so you kinda don’t want to have food you eat growing right next to the road
Wait til you hear what kind of wheel tractors have
A tractor isn’t driving there nearly as frequently as cars on a road though. Also, I would imagine tractor tires are far harder and sturdier than road tires. They’re driving slow, and there’s no need to shed material to stick to the road like with road tires.
I have no knowledge of any of this, but tractors seem like they wouldn’t be much of an issue in my mind.
Could make everything within ~3ft of the road non-edible natives, either companion plants for the food or native cultivars to help pollinators (which in turn, will help the edibles closer to the house). So there’s still a way to make this work!
yeah tbf i would not wanna eat anything that close to sidewalk anyway. dogs pee and poop there
Do you know what dirt is? Do you know what a honey-wagon is? Do you know where birds shit?
Obligatory rinse your produce remider here.
People here are pretty delusional about how food gets to the table and being overly concerned with some micro possibility of them actually noticing because they saw a study online.
they do?
Topsoil is mostly shit.
Are they absorbed into the plants? Or just wash off?
My understanding is that they get into the soil and can then get into the plants. Then into your body.
That is unless you make a post on Facebook stating you revoke their permission to get into your body
Repost immediately!!! TOS update incoming!!!
I don’t know anything about biology but that’s not how I imagined that would work.
Toxins concentrate as you climb trophic levels. It’s why tuna has so much mercury in it compared to other fish.
I don’t think that has anything to do with what we’re talking about.
Are microplastics “a toxin”?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7567360/
Toxin was a poor word choice of mine there.
Link has some light reading on the subject. TLDR, there is evidence of biomagnification in some trophic levels, but the findings are inconclusive.
Depends, but most will wash off.
You know where and how they grow the food you buy (assuming you don’t always buy organic at the farmers market)?
Ah, yes, a field where any single square foot may be run over by a tire about 2 dozen times per year obviously has the same rubber exposure as a road.
Quit with the dumb, snarky retort. It doesn’t make you look smart, it does the opposite.
Proximity to roads not only exposes a garden to tire dust, but also the asphalt can leech into the soil and be absorbed by the plants. Plus there’s the volatiles in car exhausts.
It’s common gardening advice to keep gardens at least 30ft from roads to prevent these problems. It’s far better to grow vegetable in the bacl yard instead.
(assuming you don’t always buy organic at the farmers market)?
you remember we’re a bunch of weirdos here on the fediverse, right? i live in a city, right on the edge of farm country, and i go bike out to farms and flirt/banter/barter BBQ with the farmers until they let me buy a couple logs of wood off their orchard so’s i can smoke with local apple and peach. the only time i get produce from the grocery store and not the fruit stand/farmer’s market is when (a) my mother drops by any extra she’s picked up, (b) they don’t have kumquats at the local fruit stands and i don’t want to drive out 45 minutes out to the good tree and pick 3 kumquats offa one of my favorite brunch spot’s kumquat trees, or © i forget c but I swear it exists. i gotta plant me a kumquat tree.
Busy roads, yes. Typical suburban neighborhood? Not really an issue.
The amount from traffic one residential street would be infinitesimal I imagine.
From low-speed, light vehicles? I can’t imagine it would be significant compared to farms on the interstate with 50,000+ lb (25,000 kg) trucks going 70+ mph (110 km/h) nearby.
25,000 km) trucks
That’s a fucking long truck
Oops. I fixed it.
Doomers have to comment on every nice thing
Somewhere between 9 and 28%, depending on the source. Far from “most”, but I learned something new today
It’s going to vary a lot depending on the road, specifically traffic volume and speed. Or, a four way stop where loads of drivers slam their brakes right in front of your property would probably also be pretty detrimental. For a quiet neighborhood street it would be paranoid worrying about micro plastic in your cucumbers imo.
what about four way stops where loads of drivers drop their truckloads of, let’s say tomatoes
i saw a tomato spill on the interstate the other day and i been thinking about it
Gotcha, garden in sleepy neighborhood, good. Garden on pit road at Talledega, bad.
Yeah that’s a no-go. The lawn extension must be kept less than 12" tall under city ordinance, and you need a license if you’re going to sell or give away those vegetables…
Hence the anarchy.
You don’t need a license to sell vegetables only like processed foods and shit like that
I was worried about this and called the city/township and turns out, as long as it’s cultivated, my plants can be as tall as I want!
I can’t make a fence with trelliseseses though. They were very adamant about that.
you need a license if you’re going to sell or give away those vegetables
Wait what?
Does come with a cost?
It’s because something something business activity.
Something something taking potential profits from major chain grocery stores, and we can’t have that.
Well there is that but they also have to go through the same beruacracy (they can just afford the red tape anyways plus lobbying to convert those nice residentials to being strip malls)
What bureaucracy? It’s vegetables in a garden. Pick them, wash them, eat them. This isn’t commercial farming where you’re using pesticides, tractors, desiel emissions, manure… It’s a garden on the corner of someone’s house.
These people likely aren’t selling their stock to a global market, but rather letting their neighbours take something for dinner.
This chain was about selling said vegetables, which is a commercial activity regardless of scale
i wish. neighbor down road has a garden like that.
and trump flags in his yard.
One thing you’ll find out about a lot of MAGA-heads is that a lot of them just despise Democrats to their core and think Owning The Libs is more important than whatever the fuck Trump is actually up to.
Very common to see this kind of guy up in New York or Massachusetts or out in California, where its barely more than a protest vote against whatever D-branded ghouls - your Newsoms and Cuomos and Katherine Clarks - are currently ruling their state. My dad was a staunch environmentalist, a shameless outspoken anti-racist, and a die-hard Reaganite. I still don’t understand it to this day, but he made the math work in his own head somehow.
One thing you’ll find out about a lot of MAGA-heads is that a lot of them just despise Democrats to their core and think Owning The Libs is more important than whatever the fuck Trump is actually up to.
Owning the Libs by… checks notes creating a neighbourhood garden for friends to have free access to fresh fruits and veggies and… Wait a minute…
Reagan Democrats George Lakoff: Moral Politics https://youtu.be/5f9R9MtkpqM?t=1821
anarchism never required not hating your neighbor
Go start a conversation
i tried. he then walked up to my house when i was not home and asked my wife, who also complimented his garden, “what position are you in when thinking about me and my garden?”
so … trump flag + sex pest. = he can fuck off.
Lmfao oh my God that is classic boomer trump supporters, I’m sorry that happened but shit is kinda funny. They have no fucking filter.
lol. dont disagree. he almost got pepper sprayed but yesh. he’d not learn either way.
My Maga neighbor will tell you how much he hates all the Black people in the neighborhood.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell people to waste their time and energy on people that are not going to be saved. You can use that energy to help your own people and it is a much better use of it.
And you know I’m going to take this a step further and ask you why the fuck you assume we’re not having conversations with those people? It’s them refusing the conversation. What rock have you crawled out from under?
Remember: don’t argue with people that John Brown would’ve shot
You can’t have a conversation with someone who is unwilling to change their stance, no matter the evidence provided in front of them.
I drive a blue car. I refuse to have a conversation with someone who tells me it’s yellow. Or that I don’t actually drive a car, but it’s actually a horse.





















