A few days ago, I posted ¨Weeds in the Front Yard: aesthetic issues and depressing effect on local property values¨, it is the story of Robert Wright´s front yard, published at the New York Times. He is defending his right to let the dandelions grow, he is against herbicides and after all, dandelion is edible.
And it was by chance, that today I found this book, now I know that there is a current movement towards edible gardens in the American front yards, a practice developed also by Michelle Obama. Maybe this practice is Robert Wright´s solution.....
¨Since the first edition of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn was published in 2008, interest in edible gardening has exploded across the United States and abroad. Even First Lady Michelle Obama is doing it! This greatly expanded second edition of the book documents the eight Edible Estates regional prototype gardens that author Fritz Haeg has planted in California, Kansas, Texas, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and England, and includes personal accounts from the homeowner-gardeners about the pleasures and challenges of publicly growing food where they live. Ten “Reports from Coast to Coast” tell the stories of others who have planted their own edible front yards in towns and cities across the country. In addition to essays by renowned landscape architect and scholar Diana Balmori, edible-landscaping pioneer Rosalind Creasy, bestselling author and sustainable-food advocate Michael Pollan and artist and writer Lesley Stern, this edition features updated text by Haeg (including his observations on the Obama White House vegetable garden); a contribution from Mannahatta author Eric W. Sanderson; and Growing Power founder, MacArthur Fellow and urban farmer Will Allen’s never-before-published Declaration of the Good Food Revolution.
This is not a comprehensive how-to book, nor a showcase of impossibly perfect gardens. The stories presented here are intended to reveal something about how we are living today and to inspire readers to plant their own versions of an Edible Estate. If we see that our neighbor’s typical grassy lawn instead can be a beautiful food garden, perhaps we will begin to look at the city around us with new eyes. Our private land can be a public model for the world in which we would like to live.¨
Dear reader, thank you so much, it was a nice surprise for me to see there are attempts to make the front landscape more " friendly". By the way, I can't see some of your comment characters, probably because of the key boards in different languages. I see squares in your name, sorry. When I was a kid, an Italian neighbor planted corn in her front yard, and it was terrible, the corn grew so much the house couldn't be seen, the neighbors complaint and she had to remove it :)
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