In America, and places beyond, homeowners’ vegetable gardens have become a target of municipal officials.
They’re beautiful, offer fresh food, conserve water, and are peaceful uses of homeowners’ private property: yet for it all, vegetable gardens still offend officials’ laughable sense of what’s appropriate.
That appropriateness in this case is little more than a dull person’s sense of propriety scarcely matters: the regulations trump good ideas.
Here’s a link to a fine story about misguided municipal badgering of vegetable gardeners: City officials are waging a war on gardens.
Hat tip to the Wisconsin Happy Farm for the link.
Posted originally on 7.26.12 at Daily Adams.
If it weren’t for those tree hugging urban foresters of Whitewater, we’d too have some kind of policy banning anything but a lush green expanse of lawn that is the premier status symbol – or was back in the 50’s. Darn those pesky environmentalists and their relentless message of doom and gloom, messing with the Jones’s I’m trying to keep up with. Now Mr. Jones has planted his entire backyard with vegetables! How on earth am I to maintain my bourgois status that keeps me and my family clamboring for mediocrity with tomatoes and squash encroaching on my property line? I only want what’s best for my family, and that is a tru-greened, chem-lawned, danger-flagged vastness that is my yard. I’ll show you, Mr. Jones. Ohhhh, I’ll show you…
Thank you Countess, for your comments. You’ve added an aristocratic flair to the blog – much appreciated.
There are few vegetable gardens that aren’t lovely, or more interesting, than plain grass lawns.