Y’all’s interpretation of anarchy is not good in this thread. Has anybody read the theory!?
No, this is some middle class bullshit.
Either that is the ugliest home design or this is AI generated nonsense. Those buildings make no sense.
I’ve seen some shit in suburbia, so I’m not entirely sure here myself.
Now that you mention it
Not on the side of the road and then I’d be perfect.
Hey now - you’re great no matter where you are!
Imagine living in america and having laws about your garden.
Buy a house not in a HOA. Problem solved. I grow stuff in my front yard every year
There are municipalities and counties that have classist lawn laws, too. In some places you either have to fight them and win or leave.
That didn’t come to mind. Where I’ve lived that’s never been a thing, the state even gave us tax credits to not have a lawn
Some places even make it illegal to collect rainwater. It’s ridiculous.
No state currently does. Very few have limits on the amount of catchment, the only one I know is Utah and the limit is 2500 gallons. Other states just say it can’t be used for potable water
Yeah, same state that wanted us to get rid of lawns but only allows rain water collection before the water hits the ground. Thought that was a weird wrinkle
HOA says nah
Finally a good use of the “front yard”.
Front yards are for block parties but nowadays everyone just hates everyone so they go home and close the shades./jk
Back yards work well to for block parties
There’s something to the front yard that I’d never thought about. Yes back yard does work well too, but it feels more private and invite only. Whereas the front yard would feel more like an invitation for anyone to drop by. Like a neighbor from the next street over going for a walk. It seems like a more open social event that lets you get to know more people than the neighbors you’re already acquainted with.
I’ve heard the same thing about an open garage door, but not sure how widespread that practice is
Good points about the front yard vs back yard
You will all eat VERY VERY well for about 2 weeks out of the year.
Ya gotta pickle and dehydrate. Last time I had room for a garden I got the preservation and storage down in my last season.
Buy a dehydrator, never make jerky in it, you’ll never get the smell out. Works great for beans, onions and carrots.
There’s not much besides lettuce and tomatoes you can’t pickle out of a temperate zone type garden.
I was eating well well into winter.
I have a 12-tray Cabellas dehydrator and have made loads of jerky. I even bought a slicer.
I’ve pickeled, I’ve helped my mother can back in the day.
I love my neighbors, but fuck no, that’s WAY too much work.
At my last house I did hydroponic swiss shard. I’m thinking about cranking that up inside this winter.
I tried lettuce, but could never get it to harden off. as soon as I plucked the leaves they just went limp, it was like they were inflated by the water.
You will have 1 month where you struggle to consume way too much of one single vegetable every week and you will dread having to find different recipes to use ot all up.
Maybe that’s when to feed your neighbours.
Ours just gave us a load of tomatoes and aubergine. Lovely.
If we’d had more than 6 strawberries we’d probably have shared too lol.
Yeah our neighbours have ven bigger gardens so not really
Everyone in your neighbourhood has a bigger vegetable garden than you, and grows the same vegetables as you (if they were different vegetables, they might want those)?
Also they also harvest in the same two week window as you?
Because if it’s outside that window, then everyone can spread the love on their own harvest week.
Well yeah mostly the same stuff with the same harvest window
Right now I have about 16 very large cucumbers. I don’t even like pickles that much.
My 15 yo daughter eats cucumbers like apples, she would mow through those 16 in one week.
I think you gave birth to a rabbit.
Do they stomp their feet too when angry?
Who? Daughters or rabbits? Nevermind, the answer is yes!
Just remember that most microplastics come from tires so you kinda don’t want to have food you eat growing right next to the road
How can that be? Aren’t tires made of rubber?
Wait til you hear what kind of wheel tractors have
A tractor isn’t driving there nearly as frequently as cars on a road though. Also, I would imagine tractor tires are far harder and sturdier than road tires. They’re driving slow, and there’s no need to shed material to stick to the road like with road tires.
I have no knowledge of any of this, but tractors seem like they wouldn’t be much of an issue in my mind.
nah you got it right. the tire:surfacearea ratio is much higher on streets. and the wear is much higher due to type of rubber (grippy for street cars) and how it wears down due to surface roughness / friction
Are they absorbed into the plants? Or just wash off?
My understanding is that they get into the soil and can then get into the plants. Then into your body.
That is unless you make a post on Facebook stating you revoke their permission to get into your body
Repost immediately!!! TOS update incoming!!!
I don’t know anything about biology but that’s not how I imagined that would work.
Toxins concentrate as you climb trophic levels. It’s why tuna has so much mercury in it compared to other fish.
I don’t think that has anything to do with what we’re talking about.
Are microplastics “a toxin”?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7567360/
Toxin was a poor word choice of mine there.
Link has some light reading on the subject. TLDR, there is evidence of biomagnification in some trophic levels, but the findings are inconclusive.
Again, not the topic being discussed here.
Plants don’t absorb microplastics from the soil, or at least that’s my assumption.
Therefore, if you live near a road, washing your veggies should remove the microplastics that have accumulated in the leaves
Depends, but most will wash off.
Could make everything within ~3ft of the road non-edible natives, either companion plants for the food or native cultivars to help pollinators (which in turn, will help the edibles closer to the house). So there’s still a way to make this work!
Not much besides crab grass will grow within 3 feet of our roads anyway because they literally salt the earth all winter with insane amounts of road de-icer in our part of the country. The only places that get a slight reprieve are homes near reservoirs or when it gets too cold for the melt temp and they switch to sand.
It’s also why cars don’t last much more than 10 years unless undercoated and carefully maintained and cleaned all winter.
I’ve got so much crab grass this year because of the plow tearing into the yard and then the municipality reseeding it and nothing growing there lol
and both of my cars are rusty pieces of shit because I didn’t undercoat. body looks great, relatively… the frame and suspension and all brackets underneath are falling apart. a gas tank bracket disintegrated in my hand the other day.
yeah tbf i would not wanna eat anything that close to sidewalk anyway. dogs pee and poop there
Do you know what dirt is? Do you know what a honey-wagon is? Do you know where birds shit?
Obligatory rinse your produce remider here.
TIL what a honeywagon is! Never heard them called that. Mostly know them as a sucker truck or vac truck but I’m in Aussie so…
People here are pretty delusional about how food gets to the table and being overly concerned with some micro possibility of them actually noticing because they saw a study online.
they do?
Topsoil is mostly shit.
You know where and how they grow the food you buy (assuming you don’t always buy organic at the farmers market)?
(assuming you don’t always buy organic at the farmers market)?
you remember we’re a bunch of weirdos here on the fediverse, right? i live in a city, right on the edge of farm country, and i go bike out to farms and flirt/banter/barter BBQ with the farmers until they let me buy a couple logs of wood off their orchard so’s i can smoke with local apple and peach. the only time i get produce from the grocery store and not the fruit stand/farmer’s market is when (a) my mother drops by any extra she’s picked up, (b) they don’t have kumquats at the local fruit stands and i don’t want to drive out 45 minutes out to the good tree and pick 3 kumquats offa one of my favorite brunch spot’s kumquat trees, or © i forget c but I swear it exists. i gotta plant me a kumquat tree.
you remember we’re a bunch of weirdos here on the fediverse, right?
Who are you telling that to? I pick up trash in my free time…
But seriously: That’s awesome—I tip my hat to your lifestyle and take back what I said.
In my free time, I also enjoy gardening, hunting, and fishing.
This is more of a personal opinion, but I think that with homegrown vegetables (as long as you don’t use chemical pesticides and aren’t gardening right next to the highway), you’ll likely still have lower levels of contaminants than with regular, non-organic vegetables from most supermarkets—even if your garden borders a street in a residential area.
In any case, good luck with the kumquat—I have a small tree in a pot, and it would have borne a good crop this year… if I hadn’t neglected to water it over the winter.
Ah, yes, a field where any single square foot may be run over by a tire about 2 dozen times per year obviously has the same rubber exposure as a road.
Quit with the dumb, snarky retort. It doesn’t make you look smart, it does the opposite.
Proximity to roads not only exposes a garden to tire dust, but also the asphalt can leech into the soil and be absorbed by the plants. Plus there’s the volatiles in car exhausts.
It’s common gardening advice to keep gardens at least 30ft from roads to prevent these problems. It’s far better to grow vegetable in the bacl yard instead.
Quit with the dumb, snarky retort. It doesn’t make you look smart, it does the opposite.
,The pot calling the kettle black."
Busy roads, yes. Typical suburban neighborhood? Not really an issue.
The amount from traffic one residential street would be infinitesimal I imagine.
From low-speed, light vehicles? I can’t imagine it would be significant compared to farms on the interstate with 50,000+ lb (25,000 kg) trucks going 70+ mph (110 km/h) nearby.
25,000 km) trucks
That’s a fucking long truck
Oops. I fixed it.
Somewhere between 9 and 28%, depending on the source. Far from “most”, but I learned something new today
It’s going to vary a lot depending on the road, specifically traffic volume and speed. Or, a four way stop where loads of drivers slam their brakes right in front of your property would probably also be pretty detrimental. For a quiet neighborhood street it would be paranoid worrying about micro plastic in your cucumbers imo.
what about four way stops where loads of drivers drop their truckloads of, let’s say tomatoes
i saw a tomato spill on the interstate the other day and i been thinking about it
Gotcha, garden in sleepy neighborhood, good. Garden on pit road at Talledega, bad.
Doomers have to comment on every nice thing
Wild to me that Americans aren’t allowed to do this
The US is a big place. Whether or not you’re allowed to do this depends on where you live.
Yeah, but I’ve been told America is the Land of the Free, not Land of the Free, some conditions apply. Not applicable in certain jurisdictions. Check with your doctor if you are in an area free enough to grow a garden.
It’s the land of the free for the specific class, race, and ideology that phrase was implicitly intended to cover.
It’s land of the fee
“Land of the free” has only ever been propaganda. Free to sell your body and soul to a capitalist or starve to death under a bridge. Wow, what freedom.
I went to Portland, OR about a year ago, and wandered aimlessly for a couple hours before concluding that Portland is the world capital of front-yard gardening.
And our average house price is only $550,000!
Yeah, for example, Earthships are more difficult to build here in Europe (regulations…) than in, for example, New Mexico where they originated.
Americans entirely do this. It really just depends where you live
They are, just depends if you’re in an HOA or what the laws are if you’re within city limits. If you’re in unincorporated land then it’s pretty free and wild. Earth ships are a thing and started in New Mexico.
Hell, it even depends on the HOA. I live in an HOA and there are plenty of yards in the neighborhood like this. We have a pretty chill HOA. It doesn’t do much beyond taking care of a few communal spaces, organizing a couple of annual events like a community garage sale, and enforcing the most absolute basic of yard maintenance requirements. (A well-tended garden on the front yard is perfectly fine. Turning your yard into a junkyard or having three foot high grass in your front yard isn’t. You can do what you want with your property, it just needs to be clean and intentional. You could convert your whole yard over to zero-maintenance clover, and that would be perfectly fine.)
And that’s the kind of HOA I like. I do want my neighbors to maintain their properties. I want people to be free to mold their homes into whatever form they want, but no one intentionally sets out to have a yard filled with junk cars or three foot high grass. People plant grass with the intention of mowing it, it just gets away from them.
If you want grass, mow it. If you want a garden, plant it and tend it. If you want the lowest environmental impact and least effort, plant clover or other low-maintenance ground cover. Do whatever you want. I don’t care. Just keep it clean and intentional. Hell, one of my neighbors keeps a giant demon skeleton in their front yard year-round. It’s weird, but it’s intentional, so it’s fine.
I don’t want to live in a neighborhood where every house is the same. I want the freedom to express myself through my home, and I want my neighbors to have the same freedom. But at the same time, I want to live in a place where people maintain their homes. I don’t care what form you maintain your home to. But I do want it maintained. Grow as big of a garden as you want, just don’t neglect it and let it get overgrown. If you just don’t have the time and resources for a lot of yard maintenance, plant something like clover. It doesn’t take a lot of effort or resources to keep a yard neat and clean.
lol I just noticed that comment after i did post a very similar comment…
But for example suburbs are indeed a little bit well… badly regulated…
Is it normal in suburbs / cities?
Normal? Probably not normal anywhere. The money and effort in farming usually isn’t offset by the production of such a small plot. It would be more of a hobby. What is more common is a dedicated space for farming within a suburban area. Typically they have a shared area and you pay monthly for your plot. Either that or some people with a green thumb in urban areas can turn their high-rise apartment into quite the greenhouse.
When it comes to feeding the masses efficiently farmland is still the dominant and most efficient method in most countries.
It can get overly complicated. there’s so many random laws that basically you give up. Like I have a tiny garden in the back yard, which won’t give you issues; but the front yard can result in a $250 daily fine if it’s not to their liking. I had to cut off part of my driveway, which everyone else has, so my lot can be more “herbaceous” because someone (neighbor that has a tree cutting company, salty cunt) across the street called the city about me trimming a tree so a branch so it didn’t fall on my roof. I made sure to get the shittiest invasive grass you can get.
In Massachusetts near Boston I do not have to deal with any of that shit so my front yard looks exactly like this.
As Sam wrote, HOAs are terrible. I thought I escaped by moving only to have the city do the same, sigh. Bonus points: I have a old oak tree that’s half dead, can’t be cut down because it’s “protected” and it’s destroying my foundation and driveway. But the next hurricane will likely topple the tree on the road and it’s their problem then since the area it’s on is “city property” so yeah you’re luck you can have a garden. I really wanted to put one in the front yard then again the tree will kill it all anyway.
I’m pretty sure that this mostly comes down to whether or not you have an HOA. HOAs are the literal devil.
More that they don’t want to, which is worse.
Depends on HOA I guess.
Tell me you are a politically illiterate “left”-lib without telling me you are a politically illiterate “left”-lib
I’m out of the loop, what’s a “left”-lib?
Someone who grows food for their neighbors I guess
Anyone I disagree with. Look, I drew them as the virgin and I am the Chad.
Disgusting! I hope to never live to see such horrific living conditions in MY America /S
Need short fence so that dogs don’t pee there
This is larp. If everything goes great with this little pretend garden and you spend full working days of couple of people for the whole season, you’ll get 15 moderate salads from it, tops. You’re not feeding shit with it.
That’s a hobby, not a praxis or whatever.dude I had more lettuce than I could possibly eat just from the volunteers in my 4x8 planter that I didn’t bother pulling out because I couldn’t reach the other side. beans and peas and tomatoes and asparagus and lettuce and cabbage and onions and chives and raspberries all have volume in the <100sqft I’ve given them all
yes, gardening at this scale is a hobby and won’t really save you money/time. but don’t pretend it can’t have a real impact on the source of your food.
if more people did this instead of have a manicured lawn, the rabbits in the neighbourhood would be eating good
Nothing wrong with having a hobby. Selfgrown veggies taste much better than storebought anyway.
Absolutely nothing wrong with a hobby, everyone should have a lot of those, and gardening is amazing hobby if you’re into that sort of things.
When I ride my bicycle, I don’t pretend that I am a messanger of the solarpunk future riding for my neighbors, I just do my hobby for fun and health. If your idea of a good time is to fuck with the greenery, more power to you. Unless you believe you’re feeding a neighborhood with your driveway dirtpatch vegies, then I will start to get worried about your grip on reality.
So, what do you eat when the union votes for a strike? Copies of Das Kapital?
You eat your five tomatoes that you’ve spend 10 months growing of course. Other people will eat food that they bought with strike funds they allocated prior to a strike. They could’ve told you about those but you were too busy growing tomatoes on your driveway.
Everyone knows real praxis isn’t leaving the house and making connections with real people on tangible projects. Gotta stay posting revolution memes and doom scrolling
Having a hobby is good, nobody is saying that. Pretending that your hobby is actually a community service is not. You’re not more or less of a people connector and community builder when you chat to your discord kittens from the basement than when you sit ass up picking weeds on your driveway cucumber patch.
Terminally online take
i wish. neighbor down road has a garden like that.
and trump flags in his yard.
anarchism never required not hating your neighbor
One thing you’ll find out about a lot of MAGA-heads is that a lot of them just despise Democrats to their core and think Owning The Libs is more important than whatever the fuck Trump is actually up to.
Very common to see this kind of guy up in New York or Massachusetts or out in California, where its barely more than a protest vote against whatever D-branded ghouls - your Newsoms and Cuomos and Katherine Clarks - are currently ruling their state. My dad was a staunch environmentalist, a shameless outspoken anti-racist, and a die-hard Reaganite. I still don’t understand it to this day, but he made the math work in his own head somehow.
One thing you’ll find out about a lot of MAGA-heads is that a lot of them just despise Democrats to their core and think Owning The Libs is more important than whatever the fuck Trump is actually up to.
Owning the Libs by… checks notes creating a neighbourhood garden for friends to have free access to fresh fruits and veggies and… Wait a minute…
Reagan Democrats George Lakoff: Moral Politics https://youtu.be/5f9R9MtkpqM?t=1821
Go start a conversation
i tried. he then walked up to my house when i was not home and asked my wife, who also complimented his garden, “what position are you in when thinking about me and my garden?”
so … trump flag + sex pest. = he can fuck off.
Lmfao oh my God that is classic boomer trump supporters, I’m sorry that happened but shit is kinda funny. They have no fucking filter.
lol. dont disagree. he almost got pepper sprayed but yesh. he’d not learn either way.
“Damn libs turn aggressive just because you ask a simple question”
hahah right?! “can i put it in you?” “no?” “fucking libs, always ruining my boners.”
My Maga neighbor will tell you how much he hates all the Black people in the neighborhood.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell people to waste their time and energy on people that are not going to be saved. You can use that energy to help your own people and it is a much better use of it.
And you know I’m going to take this a step further and ask you why the fuck you assume we’re not having conversations with those people? It’s them the conversation. What rock have you crawled out from under?
Remember: don’t argue with people that John Brown would’ve shot
You can’t have a conversation with someone who is unwilling to change their stance, no matter the evidence provided in front of them.
I drive a blue car. I refuse to have a conversation with someone who tells me it’s yellow. Or that I don’t actually drive a car, but it’s actually a horse.
