By: Scott Carlson

“Kitchen gardens” are having their moment in the sun. But eating your lawn takes some planning.


photo by Alan Gilbert


Horticulturally, my formative years were schizophrenic. My father was a salesman for a lawn-fertilizer company; I’ll always remember him on top of a riding mower, plying his monotonous expanse of suburban green. My mother, on the other hand, grew up a farmer’s daughter, and she was used to putting the land to work, growing peas, lettuce, or rhubarb for the table.

Four years ago, when I bought my own home in suburbia—a run-down Rodgers Forge rowhouse with a scraggly, south-facing lawn—I had to choose which side I would follow. I get my environmental sensibilities from Mom, so I did what seemed natural: I started ripping out the grass and planting vegetables.

Today, a little over half of my front lawn is taken up by arugula, lettuce, radishes, tomatoes, beets, peppers, beans, onions, squash, cucumbers, and various herbs and flowers. And the agricultural spirit is spreading: My neighbor offered half of our shared strip in return for salad greens and vegetables; my friend down the street, Joe Hamilton, tore up a good deal of his backyard for a garden, and he has been going around the block, persuading neighbors to turn unused corners of their lots into raised beds in return for some produce. Joe and I even started an organization called the Rodgers Forge Farm Initiative (www.theforgefarm.blogspot.com), with a goal of helping our neighbors start at least one vegetable garden on every block.

But if the process of re-greening the Forge has earned us the admiration of some neighbors, it’s also stirred some ire. This spring, I got a letter from the Rodgers Forge Community Association telling me that my front-yard garden “does not adhere to the ideal of keeping a traditional design.” The association wants the garden gone.

The letter highlights a central tension of living in a place like the Forge: Is our Ozzie-and-Harriett suburb destined to remain as it was in 1951, when my house was built, with uniform patches of grass? Or, like all landscapes, will it evolve to reflect the needs and values of a new generation?

You might think I’m setting up a straw man, but I really do wonder. Writer and local-food advocate Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has argued that America has never developed a gardening culture because we fixate on two opposing visions of landscape: the wilderness and the lawn. In an era of collapsing ecosystems and resource depletion, should we really invest water, chemicals, energy, and land in growing a mostly useless crop like grass?

Certainly, many people across the country now get this, as our little plot is part of a back-to-the-land trend that echoes the Victory Garden movement of World War II. The White House, the Maryland governor’s mansion, and Baltimore’s City Hall all planted vegetable gardens this spring. The Open Society Institute-Baltimore and a nonprofit called Baltimore Green Space have set up “land trusts” to protect open space that urban gardeners have claimed; the city’s similar Adopt-a-Lot program encourages people to garden in abandoned spaces. The National Gardening Association predicts that an additional seven million households will take up vegetable gardening this year, a jump of 20 percent. The Home and Garden Information Center, part of the University of Maryland’s extension service, has a campaign called Grow It Eat It (www.growit.umd.edu), with the goal of getting one million Marylanders to start digging.

Jon Traunfeld, the director of the Home and Garden Information Center, has seen home-gardening movements come and go—he’s been gardening for more than thirty years. But this one, he thinks, is different. A combination of recession-era frugality (he’s calculated that a 64-square-foot garden can produce up to $275 in vegetables), food safety scares, and the locavore revolution has made home gardening the summer’s hottest pastime. Above all, Traunfeld says, “I think people really just want to get their hands in the dirt. We spend so much time with electronic devices. There is something deep inside humans to get out and touch the natural world, and this is a great way to do it.”

But people who dig up their front yards have had to fight some battles. Recently in Sacramento, gardeners and sustainability advocates won a lengthy battle against a city ordinance that would have outlawed some front-yard gardens. Traunfeld himself caught hell when he was living in Nashville many years ago after he put twenty-five tomato plants in his front yard. The notion is provocative enough to have inspired California artist/architect  Fritz Haeg to undertake a “conceptual land-art project” called “Edible Estates” that consists of front-yard vegetable gardens, including one in Baltimore (see Urbanite, August 2008).

Some objections to yard gardens come from fear, ignorance, and confusion: The letter from the Rodgers Forge association raised the specter of rats feasting on the vegetables. In fact, rats are more likely to be attracted to bird feeders, dog feces, and open garbage cans. Other objections are aesthetic. At a neighbor’s request, I took down ill-considered (and admittedly unattractive) trellises for peas and cucumbers. I’ve planted a bunch of flowers, for both appearance and attracting pollinators. I’ll avoid winter squash this year, which sprawled all over the sidewalk last season, and I won’t even think about doing potatoes in stacked tires. But making vegetable gardens look “perfect” can be difficult, because they go through a period of exuberant, rampant growth at the height of summer—that is, if they are doing what they are supposed to be doing.

But it’s worth it: A garden can both feed and pull together a community. Recently, a little girl and her aunt stopped to stare in wonderment at the strange plants growing in my yard, and I sent them off with a few tips and a head of lettuce. My neighbor Jamie said that the day Joe and I came over to help him start his compost pile and plant his tomatoes was just about the best thing that has happened to him since he moved to Baltimore.

Now, whether my vegetable garden adheres to a “traditional design,” as the community association wrote, hinges on your definition of the term. The vegetable garden is the truly traditional use of property; prior to World War II, manicured lawns and shrubbery were luxuries largely reserved for the wealthy. Browsing through historical photographs of gardens at the Baltimore County Public Library, I was struck by how images of common people and their yards frequently featured vegetable gardens. A 1920 picture of a Catonsville family is typical: The daughters are kneeling amid a riot of what looks like beans, tomatoes, and potatoes; the father stands by a patch of shoulder-high corn. That family would not recognize their landscape today—nor might the people who occupy that landscape in the future.

Because our neighborhood association claimed that residents were complaining about our garden, my wife and I sent a letter to our neighbors, inviting them to talk to us about their concerns. So far, our critics have remained silent. Instead, neighbors all around—even ones we had suspected were not fans of our unruly yard—approached us to say that they like the garden. They ask questions about what we’re growing and how we’re growing it.

So, for now, our little plot should be safe. You know how neighbors can talk. And I hope they do. I hope that talk includes a discussion of what we’re eating, how we’re sitting on the land, and how we might rediscover a new foundation for our lives, in the dirt under our feet.

—Scott Carlson interviewed agricultural activist Vandana Shiva in the April Urbanite.


Scott Carlson and Jon Traunfeld talk live about urban gardening on the Marc Steiner Show, WEAA 88.9 FM, on July 14.



REINVENTING THE YARD

illustrations by Kimberly Battista

The urban gardener who wants to make the most of his or her property faces several challenges: too little room, too much shade, too many hills, or not enough soil amid all the concrete. Jon Traunfeld of the University of Maryland’s Home and Garden Information Center considered four difficult yard types in Baltimore and offered suggestions for what to grow on them.






The Shade Yard: You often can’t till a yard with a lot of trees without damaging roots. Instead, bring in compost and soil and plant above the roots. Some fruits and vegetables can thrive in the heat of the summer in partial shade. Arugula, lettuce, and spinach are cold-weather crops that can’t tolerate a hot July sun, but they might do well with four hours of sun in hot weather. Try herbs like mint and cilantro and fruits like currants, blueberries, and gooseberries. Want a challenge? Grow mushrooms. If crops need more light, try removing the lower limbs of the trees.




The No-Yard Yard: If all you have is concrete, go for container gardening. Gardening stores sell self-watering containers with a water reservoir at the bottom. Or make your own: Fresh Food From Small Spaces, a new book by hobby gardener R.J. Ruppenthal, includes plans for making a self-watering container out of a Rubbermaid storage bin; California gardener Ray Newstead’s EarthTainer (http://earthtainer.tomatofest.com) uses a similar design. The Grow It Eat It website (www.growit.umd.edu) features plans for making self-watering containers out of 5-gallon buckets, plus a shallow “salad table” made from two-by-fours.




The Hill Yard: If you strip off the vegetation on a hillside yard to start planting, the soil will run off in the first hard rain. That land needs to be terraced, a major project that requires maintenance. Traunfeld, whose own yard is terraced in front and back, says to avoid using wood that has been treated with chemicals or petroleum products, such as old railroad ties.




The Rowhouse Strip: It’s long, thin, and hotter than hell in the summertime. Build boxes for raised beds to keep the soil from washing onto the sidewalk. Most anything will grow here, but pick heat-tolerant plants that will offer a lot of production in a small space: tomatoes, peppers, and trellising cucumbers. More adventurous gardeners might try potatoes. Keep the soil cool and moist with mulch.


Dig It 
For basic vegetable gardening tips, the University of Maryland’s Home and Garden Information Center has a website called Grow It Eat It (www.growit.umd.edu). Some overall notes: 

Don’t waste your money: Try to find free and recycled material where you can get it—scrap lumber for building raised beds, 5-gallon buckets for planters, or manure compost from a nearby farm. 

Test the soil: Lead is an issue in many urban and suburban yards. Try to establish beds away from busy streets and older structures that have been painted with lead paint. Do a soil test for nutrients and lead in any area you plan to cultivate—the University of Massachusetts offers soil tests through an online ordering form. (www.umass.edu/plsoils/soiltest)

Get digging: Make raised beds out of two-by lumber—boxes without tops or bottoms, staked to the ground. Cover the grass with newspaper or cardboard, and fill those boxes with clean dirt. Mulch with free materials such as shredded newspaper or grass clippings. 

Grow organically: There’s no point in spending all this time and money on gardening if you’re going to grow the same pesticide-drenched vegetables you can buy cheap in any store. Let worms do your work.

Learn about rot: Every garden needs a compost pile. You can either build or buy a bin (Baltimore County sells compost bins at a deep discount), but learn how the process works or you’ll have a smelly liability in your yard. And note your local regulations: Baltimore City composters require enclosed bins with a lid or door; in Baltimore County, it’s illegal to use food scraps.

Be an ambassador: Try to make your garden look as good as possible. Share the harvest with neighbors who put up with the appearance of a vegetable garden—and talk to them about what you are doing. 

—S.C. 



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