DryStoneGarden

dodge vegematic with winter squash

Rumors have been circulating that fruits and vegetables might be illegal to grow in the front yards and hellstrips of some Bay Area cities, but the city of Richmond investigated and found that there are no ordinances against them. The investigation came from the top, from our mayor, Gayle Mclaughlin.

‘“If it is indeed a Richmond law, I would like to ask the city attorney’s office to change/cancel this ordinance and bring it to council for a vote ASAP. I would be happy to sponsor such an ordinance change.” 

Assistant City Attorney Mary J. Renfro came up with the definitive answer, reached after consulting the city’s Health, Public Safety and Welfare and Zoning codes. 

While some legal provisions require yard maintenance and “prohibit nuisance conditions that might attract trespassers and vermin,” none of them suggests that it is impermissible to grow fruit or other edible plants in the front yard.

It’s good that the mayor checked on vegi gardens and established that they’re okay, because there has been a front yard vegi garden movement in my Richmond Annex neighborhood for the last couple of years. Six gardens within a block of each other grow vegetables (these are small blocks with 2-5 houses per block, so that’s a high percentage) and, a couple of blocks away from them, another one converted their lawn to vegetables three months ago. 

onions and juniper

The first of the gardens, the one that began the trend, is a front yard of veggies grown in raised beds of mortared stonework from the juniper/ivy era of California landscaping. It is far and away the tidiest of the gardens, and it produces an impressive quantity of food throughout the year. Even when large sections are only bare dirt and small seedlings or when the plants get raggedy at the end of their harvest period, the walls and the orderly planting style and to some extent the pom-pommed junipers always make it clear that this is a well-maintained garden.

carrots and juniper

Photos of more gardens are below.

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Photo from Pogo Park Photovoice

“Beautiful community garden that Iron Triangle has.  I’d really like to see more gardens, more flora, in the city of Richmond.” Click over to Pogo Park Photovoice to hear the speaker’s voice.

I was going to post some more content from Anita’s class about grasses, but an article in this week’s East Bay Express caught my attention with the mention of a photovoice project in the Iron Triangle of Richmond. (The Iron Triangle was originally defined as the area between three old railroad lines, but now refers more generally to the area between highways 80 and 580. Urban problems affect the area much more heavily than they do other parts of Richmond such as Richmond Annex where I live.) I complained recently about how there is sometimes a disconnect between designers and the communities they design for. Photovoice, where members of a community are given cameras to make their own document about their community, is a method to try to overcome that disconnect. It’s not so different from what garden designers do whenever they try to design for a new client, but photovoice projects are usually with communities that don’t often get their voices heard and don’t always get to participate in the design process for their own communities. I don’t know much about the Iron Triangle, even though I live in Richmond, so it was good to see the photos and hear the voices of the people who took them. I’ll be interested to see how the park turns out.

   

map of a compact community, walkability within 1 mile, from sightline.org

In the planning world, one mile is considered walkable and one quarter of a mile is the gold standard. WalkScore.com takes that standard and gives a rating from 1-100 for an address, giving high points for things like stores, libraries, and schools within a quarter mile and diminishing points for up to a mile. The ratings seem fairly accurate, my current address gets an 83, very walkable, while the house where I grew up gets a 27, very unwalkable. That matches with my experience at both places.
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One guiding factor of our home garden is that we are renters. For instance, we plant a lot of annuals, we keep our olives in containers instead of in the ground, and we gave the prime spot to our vegi garden for immediate, practical returns. We intend to leave an intact, low-maintenance, low-water, relatively self-sustaining garden when we eventually leave, but our status as renters has always affected our garden decisions. (more…)

Misguided, brilliant, makes me smile.

ryan 12/20

– Note — Anita claims the roadrunner says Beep Beep, I claim Meep Meep. According to someone on Metafilter, the voice of the roadrunner, Chuck Jones, spelled it ‘Beep-Beep,” but pronounced it ‘Meep-Meep.”