Green thumbs reap savings from their front yards

By ELLEN SIMON, Associated Press, July 29, 2007

NEW YORK — 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.
It's also a way for many to save money on grocery bills.

Nat Zappia, 32, a graduate student, turned the front yard of the home he and his wife rent in Santa Monica, Calif., into a vegetable garden, with his landlord's permission.
He estimates it supplies 35 to 40 percent of the food they eat.

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.

Bob Waldrop of Oklahoma City said his 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.

He planted his corner lot almost entirely with fruit trees, berry bushes and vegetables.
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, Wisc.

"This movement can start with simply one tomato plant growing in one's yard," she said.

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.
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.
Other gardeners were inspired by books such as Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture and The Year I Ate My Yard.

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, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, says he's been overwhelmed by the response.

Some 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 Waldrop of Oklahoma City.
"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.
"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?"