Yes, I'm biased, I'm a big fan. Just wanted to share some highlights because I think the article doesn't do the amazing work of Jamiah and his team justice. I hope we get to see many more such micro farms all across Los Angeles and Southern California.
Then, 19th century middle-class, in an attempt to look wealthier and having no personality whatsoever, replicated the trend on their tiny lots, even though they owned much less land, and keeping a lawn is a financial burden.
Nowadays, there's so much profit in this space (equipment, herbicides, etc) that there's an immense marketing budget to keep the status quo.
That's why it's important to learn your history. Good to see this trend reversing.
I'm from South America, and my grandma's house had: mango, peach, lime, orange, grapevine, berries, coconut, jaboticaba, pitanga, acerola, atemoia (native fruits), and many types of spices (including a bay laurel tree). All that in a lot that barely parked 3 cars.
Also over the pond it's an invention much older than merely the 18th century.
Here in DFW where we didn't see a drop of rain for 3-4 months and +100 heat, it was around $600 a month in water to keep it green. I also never see anyone outside playing on their lawn. I see landscape maintenance once a week at a minimum cost of $45 per visit. Can't forget all the poison laid down 6 times a year at 100 + to kill the weeds and fertilize. The costs are enormous and the environmental damage is insane.
Lawn is like a carpet in a landscape. You can walk on it, lie on it, play on it, or just enjoy the esthetic of a lush uniform finish.
I suspect that disdain for lawns is correlated to disdain for ornate architecture or tasteful interior design. Some people just aren’t sensitive to the deep psychological effects of the spaces we live in.
I don’t have a disdain for beautiful things and I wasn’t even planning on keeping the tent up. The demand for uniformity is what irks me.
This seems a bit conspiratorial, I'm sure the same companies would love to sell gardening equipment as well.
I just don't think most people bother. Gardening is super fun, but only if you know what you're doing or have the time and capacity to learn.
Lawns are nice for children to play on. Maybe that's why hackers hate them so much?
Is this weird to people? In general I've learned to not pay attention to anything in the NYT when it comes to discussing California.
I'm in San Diego, many many people grow a garden in their yard. Front, back, wherever they have room.
Lawns are still more prevalent than I would expect. Even now, most people here don't realize that anything that's not brown sage scrub is being sustained with water from Colorado.
I was lucky enough to know some people before they died, who taught me: if you can't eat it, or smoke it, don't water it...
Having a lawn is a ridiculous waste of resources, anyway. It's a win-win.
In addition to the items you've listed, I'd add grapes/ muscadines, passionfruit (grows wild so cheating), fruit and nut trees (figs are easy if you keep them pruned), berries, tea, lettuce/greens, celery, potatoes, carrots, herbs. I used to hate gardening, but it's grown on me over the last few years. The only thing I don't like growing is squash really.
Gardening really is a hobby more than a practical life-hack. Although we did just get a hydroponic setup for greens in the house, and hopefully that can supply greens that are better and actually much cheaper.
This year we may do squashes and eggplants ...
If you think it can replace industrial farming, we need to have a serious talk.
Growing your own food is also called "subsistence farming". It's how many of the poorest of the poor survive. It's back breaking work to get just enough to survive, and in bad years you get to watch your kids starve to death.
One of the greatest and least appreciated miracles of the modern age is industrial farming, which produces huge amounts of food in small areas. Without it most of us 8 billion humans would die quickly.
It's a social responsibility that can dramatically reduce the demand for industrial agriculture, which is essentially unsustainable when used as the only source of food supply. As it depletes nearby resources by overworking the land it occupies, it has to pull on an increasingly distant and increasingly expensive supply chain. And as with all industrial processes, its prospects for for maintaining peak efficiency at all times are infintessimal because industrial scale supply chains get disrupted in industrial scale catastrophes. It's extremely productive but also extremely brittle to both physical and social tumult.
As recently as WWII, well into the era of industrial agriculture, US production and land use needs were spread thin enough that its people faced rationing. Home gardens were encouraged as a way to improve both nutrition and morale for families during a difficult time for the country, and the feasibility of those home gardens benefited from what had then still been a widespread cultural familiarity with how to grow such gardens effectively. Hard times will come again, and having a diffuse, local, personal food supply maintained by people aren't just learning how to do at the last minute will make a big big difference.
Grow your own food because you care about those kind of things.
Not with lettuce or fruits, of course, but with potatoes/beans and gourds likely.
More housing needs to exist - but ALL housing does not need to be dense multistory developments.
Just about everyone is like this, and hence why housing is such a nightmare situation.
"I want a nice home that is situated in a relaxing quiet personal space, that is a short commute from my well paying job, and an even shorter drive to restaurants and entertainment" - 90% of people
You could just not butt up to the very edge of your own lot, and everyone else can use their own as they wish. Another option would be to buy the lots around you and not build anything on them.
The thing with NIMBYs is that they want everyone else to pay for their desires.
My in-laws have an incredible native garden in California that is beautiful enough to have appeared in a couple of publications as an example (this is not some extravagant and rich family either, by any means). They rarely have to water their garden, compared with their neighbours who seem to have to hose/sprinkle their lawns every other day, practically.
0: https://www.canr.msu.edu/nativeplants/plant_facts/local_info...
I also have a front lawn, which I haven't watered in several years, but comes back with the rain. I want to smother it permanently in cardboard, but that in itself is quite a lot of work that I refuse to admit I need to hire someone to get it done.
His dog ate them all the time too, absolutely spoiled!
Likewise when I lived in Hawaii, my girlfriends grandmother had a mango tree the size of Tennessee and she'd give me big paper bags full of mangos. Best I have ever had.
I do miss this about living in a warmer climate.
That said I had a very productive dacha north of Moscow so there’s plenty of stuff you can grow in colder climates, you just have to more creative with your choices.
I'm told farming is very hard work though, especially without machines.
It won't look "nice neighborhood" nice but it'll still be fine.
That's true - there's nothing in the world that tastes like fresh-cut cilantro (definitely not day old cilantro). Unfortunately, it takes a lot of work to keep a cilantro plant from bolting.
My kids love to run around my backyard, and I keep it mowed and trimmed for them to do so.
The iconoclasm runs deep in techno-optimists, but some things stick around for a reason.
If I had the choice and I was forced to allocate, I would choose 100% backyard and 0% frontyard.
Is that common with the stated definition? In the US, it is not especially if you add sustaining levels of production vs just hobby level
For example, the Great British Bake-off has the tent in the garden. But no red blooded 'murican would consider that expanse of manicured grass as a garden.
Once setup it's low daily maintainance, pull weeds when seen and throw them in the compost, lots of things self seed or come back when leftovers + compost are turned over in a clean bed.
The layout dates back to the 1930s and was planned to be self sufficient with no "grid" as such.
Now it's much as it was with solar panels, big batteries, and fibre + home lab.
We have two three sided "bunkers" 2 metre x 2 metre square x 1.5 metre high that we fill with weeds and then cover every spring (on rotation), once covered they cook pretty hot which kills most things within, reduce them to juice and worm food and when respread a year later they grow good veggies.
We've just today finished spreading three double axle trailer loads (each about 1.5 tonne) of donkey poo and straw .. that's got a lot grass seed and digested grassy fecal matter in it .. it'll make great figs and probably grow grassy weeds under the fig tree .. that'll get pulled and thrown in the heaps also.
Pretty much the only things that don't go in the compost piles are metal, rocks, plastic, etc - if it's organic, it's in.
* Possums spread fleas like nobody’s business
Only in areas with fruit trees though.
You can’t make something that’s far away from other people and yet close to the things that need people to continue existing.
They absolutely ruin the harvest though. We manage to pick maybe a tenth of the pomelos and pomegranates that ripen before the rats get to them. I made a deal with one of my neighbors to tear down the fence and hedges separating our properties to prevent them from easily moving between trees on that side so at least the avocados are safe.
We’ve got rats in California but they’re a minor suburban nuisance, not a giant public health problem like in New York.
Or go into a crawl space or an attic - and then yikes.
LA does have a lot fewer of both of those though eh?