Selfsufficientish.com

The ladies over at Geek Mom have just shared this blog post. A family's front yard in Michigan had to be dug up for some repairs to be done on a sewer line. Instead of putting the lawn back to how it was, they decided to have a veggie garden instead, only to be asked to remove it or face being taken to court.

http://www.geekmom.com/2011/07/michigan ... -a-garden/

This kind of thing goes on a lot in the 'land of the free'.

Nomada wrote:This kind of thing goes on a lot in the 'land of the free'.

Yes it does. I'm a USC married to a UKC, we live in Angus. I was in the US this past spring waiting for my spousal visa to be determined and while I was there I was sorry to see that even with the economic troubles neighbourhood Home Owner Associations are still trying to keep all things self-sufficientish prohibited or at least hidden. I stayed with my son and was very glad that his neighbourhood is more sensible-I was able to hang out the washing, and start a container vegetable for him.

But one block over? Oh no, you have to hide that vegetable garden, and get permission from the planning commission to put up a washing line.

Un- beleivable! As a certain Victor Meldrew would say. How pathetic, but wow I'd get life then, my whole front garden is a veg patch and the washing line and chickens share the postage stamp back garden. Just hang me now!

The US was founded by groups of rebels who were sick and tired of government interference.

The US government has a tendancy to forget that.

All I can say is that that sounds like a pretty repressive community and one I would never voluntarily choose to live. I can understand it from the community's point of view, because they're striving for a certain upscale image in Oak Park evidently and a vegetable garden in the front lawn conveys something hippie-dippy and downscale. So it makes sense in a disgusting way. But we have to ask ourselves whether the city has a right to organize itself the way the people living there want to, just as we would recognize a person's right to live there or not.

Sadly, some vegetable patches can look quite scruffy so I can sympathise with the neighbours to a certain extent. I just wish property developers would consider the various different needs of residents. A more private garden instead of these open-plan front lawns that they all seem to favour, would allow residents to make their own minds up about how they wanted to use their own gardens.

I've seen lots of developments where the houses all have huge front gardens and nothing at the back. Designed to make the estate look spacious and spread out when it's nothing of the sort.

Zoe