Food Not Lawns

From the article “Don’t be Wasted on Grass! Lawns to Gardens!” by Heather Coburn, http://www.foodnotlawns.com/lawns_to_gardens.html

“French aristocrats popularized the idea of the green grassy lawn in the eighteenth century, when they planted the agricultural fields around their estates to grass, to send the message that they had more land than they needed and could therefore afford to waste some. Meanwhile, French peasants starved for lack of available ground, and the resulting frustration might have had something to do with the French Revolution in 1789.”

Other fun facts:
- Today, 58 million Americans spend approximately $30 billion every year to maintain over 23 million acres of lawn. That’s an average of over a third of an acre and $517 each. The same size plot of land could still have a small lawn for recreation, plus produce all of the vegetables needed to feed a family of six.

- The lawns in the United States consume around 270 billion gallons of water a week—enough to water 81 million acres of organic vegetables, all summer long.

- Lawns use ten times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland.

- The pollution emitted from a power mower in just one hour is equal to the amount from a car being driven 350 miles. In fact, lawns use more equipment, labor, fuel, and agricultural toxins than industrial farming, making lawns the largest agricultural sector in the United States.

This little website (and the book that accompanies it) plays on the Food Not Bombs idea and takes it a step further. Rather than growing grass for lawns (still not totally sure what those are for), and wasting all that time mowing the grass (because who really enjoys that, anyway?), we could use the lawn for something particularly useful. Such as… food. It’s a novel concept, but it shouldn’t be. In fact, it’s alarmingly obvious.

See earlier post on food crisis.

Now, taking out lawns and replacing them with beautiful, productive vegetable gardens not only makes more sense, but appears to be better for the environment, and better for the local economy (ie not buying our food from California) and educational and much more attractive. And less time intensive, depending on what kind of food plants you put in! You could have a yard full of fruit trees, and a beautiful shady place to relax, and more peaches than you know what to do with. All we have to do is abandon the mindset that a lush, green, chemically treated lawn somehow puts you in a higher income bracket in the perception of your neighbors.

Imagine the possibilities…