Guest Column: Let’s tear it up! The front lawn, I mean…

Guest Column: Let’s tear it up! The front lawn, I mean…
(Lucas Harrison-Zdenek, Ferndale Permaculture, March 23, 2015)
I was recently asked to give a talk for the Ferndale Garden Club. I was told I could choose any topic I wanted, as long as it was relevant to gardening in some way. I’m an average gardener, but I tend to focus on food, rather than ornamentals, mostly because vegetable gardens are usually tucked into the back yard and don’t have to be pretty. In fact, the last couple of years my vegetable gardens, while highly productive, looked more like a thicket than an organized patch of meticulously planted crops. This is all fine and well when you are concealing it from the view of people passing by your house, but I began to wonder about the folks who take a big gamble and plant the whole front yard of their house with something other than turf grass. This curiosity led me to the topic of my talk: Edible Perennial Front Yard Gardening.
At first glance, that title seems a bit wordy and overwhelming. I came up with it in the moment and almost immediately regretted it! I am a student of permaculture and design is a very big part of that. As it turns out, my curiosity about front yard edible gardens was the tip of a very large “design iceberg”. There was clearly a reason I already owned two books on edible landscaping (neither of which I had ever made time to read until I agreed to give this talk). Upon opening these books and studying the design elements of this method of gardening, I realized that it isn’t so different from what most people are already doing with ornamental flower beds, except that it produces food in addition to aesthetic value and it incorporates the entire front yard space, rather than just a small bed near the house. In fact, there are so many benefits to planting an edible garden over a grass lawn, that it quickly became ridiculous to me that so few people are actually doing it.
There are a few considerations to be made here. The first is that converting a front yard space into an edible vegetable and fruit garden is relatively labor intensive. You have to remove the grass, build up beds, design to create a pleasing aesthetic (and to avoid citations from the local code enforcement!), and meticulously pick the plants most suited to the task of being aesthetically pleasing. After all of this is complete, you have to keep a watchful eye on the weather during the season and make some notes about what works well and what may need some adjustment the following season. While this may all sound a bit unattainable, let me assure you, this project is not all that different from most other summer projects. It doesn’t have to be done all at once and it definitely will not turn out perfect the first time. The idea is exactly like any vegetable garden: learn from each season and move forward, more confident in your attained knowledge and skill.
The second consideration to be made is actually more motivating than deterring. Removing your grass helps the environment. It’s true! Turf grass, that is the kind we use in our lawns, is the largest irrigated crop in the U.S. It seems hard to believe, but it is true. The acreage of lawns in this country is more than that of corn, or soybeans, or wheat individually. And last I checked, we don’t eat grass. Actually, we wouldn’t want to eat it if we could, thanks to the toxic chemical fertilizers that are often used on our lawns. Between the incessant over-fertilization, unnecessary watering (many times during or just after a heavy rain), and the other labor intensive, carbon creating activities we engage in to maintain a non-productive grass lawn, doesn’t it make more sense to replace it with something that doesn’t pollute the watershed or waste fresh, potentially drinkable water? Like I said, it is ridiculous that we aren’t all doing this!
So in addition to telling the Garden Club about replacing the grass with food, I found my way to include some very simple, but incredibly useful permaculture techniques into the front yard edible garden design. I won’t go into details here, since there is a tremendous amount of free information on the internet for anyone who might be interested, but design elements like hugelkultur beds, which can be built from excess wood scraps, yard waste and soil, are excellent for use in the front yard edible garden because they require almost no irrigation and create fertile soil as the break down. Other space saving design elements like the herb spiral, which increases the planting area without increasing the footprint it occupies, can grow all the herbs needed in the kitchen in a small space with very little water needed. The herb spiral is also amazing because it can contain both sun and shade loving plants within the same design element.
My talk seemed to be well received, but ultimately I learned a huge amount about this method of designing a space and how to make it both beautiful and functional. I always enjoy learning new ways to increase the usefulness of my small Ferndale yard space. I plan to host a few more events this summer if I can find the time and people interested in what is being presented, so look for more events and talks like this one in the near future!
Lucas Harrison-Zdenek manages the blog and group Ferndale Permaculture. “Ferndale Permaculture is about more than just one person or one idea or even one life philosophy. It is about our interactions. The way we interact with one another, our environment, our economy and society as a whole. This page, group, and movement is about growing a community of people who ascend above the status quo and create a culture of cooperation.” Learn more at http://ferndalepermaculture.blogspot.com/.

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