Lawn grass is the largest irrigated U.S. crop. "Even conservatively," notes NASA researcher Cristina Milesi, "I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn."
Wow, that's a lot of ornamental grass -- about 128,000 square kilometers worth, roughly equal in size to the state of Wisconsin. According Milesi, keeping all of that grass green requires about 200 gallons of fresh, typically drinking-quality water per person per day. (Interestingly, Milesi does find that lawns are net carbon sinks, but she doesn't mention emissions associated with mowing.)
Happily, people are increasingly finding more productive -- and delicious -- uses for their little patches of land. From the Wall Street Journal lifestyle section:
As consumers balk at the rising cost of groceries, homeowners increasingly are cutting out sections of lawn and retiring flower beds to grow their own food. They're building raised vegetable beds, turning their spare time over to gardening, and doing battle with insect pests.
The article cites evidence from all over the country that people are investing time, money, and yard space to veggie patches. For example:
At Al's Garden Center in Portland, Ore., sales of vegetable plants this season have jumped an unprecedented 43 percent from a year earlier, and sales of fruit-producing trees and shrubs are up 17 percent. Sales of flower perennials, on the other hand, are down 16 percent.
The article profiles enthusiastic home veggie gardeners across the country. A woman in South Carolina explains the appeal:
You get a pack of seeds for a dollar or two, and you have got a whole bed of organic vegetables for a fraction of what you'd pay at the store. And they taste better.
It should be noted that this Journal article is describing a distinctly comfortable-middle class phenomenon: Homeowners, shocked at the price of fancy organic veggies, getting their hands in the dirt.
Laudable as the trend is, it's not for everyone. As the above-quoted South Carolinian noted, she laid out $500 to get her initial garden going. That's more than people living hand-to-mouth can afford -- even ones with lawn access.
But that doesn't mean the pleasures and benefits of veggie gardening can't -- or aren't -- being broadened.
First, there's the burgeoning community-garden movement. Then there's stuff like what I discovered last summer during a trip to Chicago, where I met with folks from a group called Growing Power at a garden site in Grant Park, near Chicago's lovely lake front.
Eat your park: Growing Power in Chicago.
Growing Power exists to improve food security and build wealth in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago and Milwaukee through both urban farming and linking inner-city consumers to nearby farms.
And in one of its many programs in Chicago, the group had been hired by the city to create and maintain raised vegetable beds in Grant Park, an area normally covered in grass and ornamental landscaping. To do so, Growing Power provided paid jobs to inner-city teens who might otherwise be unemployed, working at McDonald's, or caught up in various illegal trades. In the process, they bring affordable organic and truly local food into areas that lack access to supermarkets.
That seems like a much better use of a public jewel like Grant Park than maintaining a bunch of stuff that tastes like, well, grass.
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Comments
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kmp Posted 9:33 am
06 Jun 2008
The truth of the matter is that we rent a cottage and we share yard space with our landlord, the owner of the main house. He hires a team of gardeners (a constantly rotating team of short, Hispanic guys, who are generally polite, but refuse to look me in the eye even when I say hello) and once Memorial Day rolls around they come every Friday morning like clockwork to mow with the tractor mower and blow leaves (with the annoyingly loud power blower) out of the yard.
It doesn't take them all that long to do the area around my cottage; maybe 30 minutes. But every week it annoys me just the same - it just seems so wasteful. It's only the first week in June - our "lawn" definitely does not need mowing every week. When I suggested to my landlord that perhaps every other week would be sufficient, he said you can only hire the guys either once a week or once a month and he thought once a month was too infrequent. Sigh.
On the bright side, they never water and they don't put any kind of pesticides, weed-killer or seed down. My yard isn't really what anyone would call "lawn;" the cottage is surrounded by trees, mainly hemlock and poplar, with a few maples and oaks, so it is quite shady. There is definitely grass, but there are at least a dozen other varieties of plants; if I knew anything about botany I could probably identify them. I know there are wild strawberries in the yard, but you almost never see a berry before a deer, bird, squirrel or chipmunk does. There are a couple of varieties of moss, and some tiny white & purple flowering plants. At least it is not the typical monoculture "lawn." I've never quite understood the appeal.
As for growing your own, I started my first ever tomato plants from seed this year. Of course, I started them too late (even though every book & website I looked at said 6 to 7 weeks prior to the first frost date); the biggest of said seedlings is about 3 inches tall right now. Well, I'm ever hopeful that we'll get a long, warm Fall... there are worse things than fresh tomatoes in October. As insurance, I bought a much larger tomato plant from a local organic farm - an orange heirloom variety - which has already sprouted it's first tiny tomato fruit. Whoo hooo! For the investment of $3.50 for the plant, about $5 worth of 'organic' potting mix, and $4 for an old bushel basket as container, I should have dozens of delicious, heirloom tomatoes in a month or two. Compared to propagating from seed, this was so easy it feels like cheating!
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emmapb Posted 10:02 am
12 Jun 2008
Food. Culture. Food.
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PermieWriter Posted 10:41 am
12 Jun 2008
Eat what you grow, grow what you eat
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bobdurivage Posted 6:29 am
14 Jun 2008
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savee419 Posted 6:10 am
08 Aug 2008
You know, it's the little things...
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wiscidea Posted 6:36 am
08 Aug 2008
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