Farming in the Burbs

One thing that bothers me about the anti-organic people is their meme that there just will never be enough affordable organic food out there to feed the masses. But I (maybe naively) think about all those suburban lawns in America, just waiting to be farmed organically, with compost fertilizer and water saved in rain barrels. Seed can be cleaned and saved and planted next year. Ripe fruits and vegetables can be canned and eaten well into winter.

As long as I've been living in the suburbs as an adult, I've wanted to start a garden. Ripe vegetables eaten minutes after they've been harvested are the most flavorful and juicy. Cherry tomatoes picked off the vine in the backyard, pesto made from basil bushes growing thigh-high, squashes green and yellow and sweet as candy...And when I was a girl, gardening was as easy as dumping a scoop of powdered, fluorescent-green Miracle Grow into a watering can. Standing in the hot August sun, I got my feet wet watering the tomatoes. After dinner, my dad would turn to me and my sister and say, "Go out and water the garden." Our plot was about ten feet by fifteen, and was there when we moved in, so we didn't have to think much about it. Every year, we bought flats from the local nursery and put tomatoes, green beans, peppers, cucumbers, and eggplant in the ground without much fanfare, usually on Mother's Day. Through the short summer, we weeded, watered, fertilized, and eventually harvested. It was not very complicated, but God! Did we harvest!

There were so many red tomatoes, we had to give them away in bulging grocery bags. We got tired of eating pumpkins into December, the year I decided to try growing those. Pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, baked pumpkin, stuffed pumpkin, pumpkin cookies, roasted pumpkin seeds, and so on.

Last year, when we moved into our own place, we started composting, and by this spring, had accumulated enough "black gold" to fertilize a small garden without using any Miracle Grow. I had planned on putting the first seedlings into the ground on Mother's Day, but my dreams have been put on hold. Our neighbor nixed the idea because he thought it would be ugly on our commonly-owned lawn, and he is trying to sell his side of the duplex. It was a sore point for me, because I find gardens beautiful, much more so than an emerald meadow, an astroturf-like backyard. But I could also see his point, since we already had a kiddie play-structure and a few Adirondack chairs marring an otherwise homogeneous expanse of green. You could tell, he believed in the idea of a "perfect" lawn. His objection was that a brown space full of plants would be an eyesore, where he'd see it from his second-floor window. Because here's the thing: he wasn't planning on usingthe backyard, just looking at it.

Unfortunately, a lot of burbanites agree with him. Grounds are groomed by landscape artists and seeded with flowers, shrines to the short green grass gods. Pesticides and weed killers and petroleum-based fertilizers are applied, even by folks with little kids running around. Dinner scraps are thrown into garbage bags to be sent to landfills, instead of into compost bins to become future dinners.

Our neighbors cut down trees too close to their houses. Our neighbors make us fill our garden with grass seed. Is the suburban lifestyle sustainable? If we who love our expanses of green grass turned most of it to the birds and some of it to gardening sustainably, would we be healthier? Would the planet be healthier? Would our spaces be as beautiful and just as useful to young families? I think so, but it seems I'm outvoted.