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Edible Estates is a project started by architect/artist Fritz Haeg to “replace the front lawn with edible garden landscapes”. He aims to challenge the grassy lawn supremacy of front yard suburbia with six test projects. To date, yard conversions have been completed in Salina, Kansas; Lakewood, California; Maplewood, New Jersey; and London, England; with upcoming projects slated for Austin, Texas and Baltimore, Maryland.
I like how this project challenges the domain of grass. For most of us with front lawns, this space is essentially for public consumption. The grass anchors our home in a neighbourhood through assimilation – a sea of green sweeping down the block. The space is rarely used for anything more than the yardwork – mowing, seeding, trimming, feeding – necessary to maintain a velvety green appearance. In our neighbourhood, few of the front yards are fenced in (including ours). The lack of physical or visual barriers blur the distinction between public and private space.
Edible Estates aims to engage the unquestioned assumption that the front yard is both public and for grass. By planting edibles, it speaks to pre-suburbia when land use was necessarily utilitarian. It engages community with the gardener’s visible presence. It challenges the unspoken (or in some cases legislated) assumption that grass is king. It promotes partial self-sufficiency by the homeowners – it’s hard to eat more locally than visiting your front yard. All of these are interesting and timely goals – certainly food for thought (sorry – I couldn’t resist).
Once a location is selected, Mr. Haeg and a crew of volunteers descend on the home to rip out turf and establish the garden with donated materials. Each garden is designed to reflect local conditions through plant choice, and each garden looks quite distinctively different. The Lakewood garden after planting looks quite pretty, while the Maplewood garden seems founded on square-foot gardening principles.If I had a criticism, it would be that the gardens as designed seem to be very labour-intensive, and seasonal in nature. The garden will look great for a small part of the year, and bedraggled for the rest. Is it possible to design an edible landscape that still looks pretty year-round?
A front yard is private property, but it is still for public consumption. This is one of the questions that I am struggling with in designing my own front-yard garden. What permanent elements can provide year-round structure and form, while still allowing for ongoing turnover in the vegetable beds? How do you combine the strictly functional nature of vegetable production with artistic impulses? Perhaps I will plant great swaths of swiss chard and drifts of radicchio…
More info:
Edible Estates website
NY Times article: Redefining American Beauty, by the Yard
Treehugger TV: Edible Estates
Photos sourced from edibleestates.org.
the omnivore’s dilemma by michael pollan
Everyone interested in food should read this book. I loved it and it changed my thinking about how we as a family and a species should eat.
Michael Pollan is a journalist and contributing writer to the New York Times magazine. His prose is elegant and informed and reflects his wide-ranging interests and eclectic depth of knowledge about food.
The book starts off a bit slowly, but as you track his exploration into the origins of four meals – McDonald’s fast food, Organic Big Food (purchased at Whole Foods), Organic Small Food (from a self-sustaining organic farm), and Self-Produced (hunted, gathered and grown by the author) – you get seriously caught up in the evils of monoculture agriculture (corn bad!), the bliss of cow manure (yay fertilizer!) and the nail-biting tension of mushroom hunting (seriously). I literally could not put the book down over the Christmas holidays, and believe me, there were plenty of other demands for my attention.
For more information, visit Michael Pollan’s website.
This book is rated E for Excellent- who knew reading about corn could be so suspenseful?
square foot gardening by mel bartholomew
Mel Bartholomew advocates his system of planting quite energetically. Like any retired engineer, he likes the grid and organization of raised bed planting, and takes it another step or two further. His method can be broken down into 3 steps:
1. Build raised 4′ x 4′ beds on top of your existing soil.
2. Fill the box with his special soil combination of 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 compost.
3. Divide the boxes into grids of square feet and plant different things in each square.
The results, he claims, are weed-free, productive, low-maintenance gardens that do away with having to amend soil without “the hard work and drudgery of single row gardening”.
He makes some good points about maintaining your garden without walking on it (i.e., use aisles) and biodiversity. He also advocates staggering planting times and harvests. If you love squares and rectangles, this is the method for you! If you like a more naturalistic approach, perhaps not. It’s not the prettiest approach to gardening, and if you want a large amount of produce (like me), it seems quite capital intensive.
I think I will try his approach to raised beds and vertical gardening along the back fence in my existing garden plot. In the past, I have had terrible luck with squash and zucchini of all things. Everyone I know grows zucchini in spite of themselves, whereas I can’t get it past the slugs. Okay, so technically, I left the zucchini to defend themselves against being devoured, but I figured this was a good method of crop management – only the strong would survive to be eaten. This summer, I’m going up with all of these, and I will attempt to build his suggested vertical structures for bearing these, using rebar, electrical conduit piping and nylon webbing. Ugly but practical?
For more information, visit the Official Square Foot Gardening website.
