Mowing down the need for a conventional front lawn

ROCKVILLE, MD. On the back of Susan Eisendrath’s little SUV, a bumper sticker reads: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

You need only go a few feet — to her curbside front yard — to see Gandhi’s aphorism brought to life. What was once a typical grass lawn under the shadow of a big old silver maple is now an assortment of raised growing beds, mulched paths and fruiting vines attached to various structures. A vestige of grass remains, but the veggie beds are interspersed with sunflowers, monarda, butterfly weed and a few other blooms for the pollinators and birds. In one corner, a beehive rises like a lighthouse. Eisendrath and her husband, Joe Libertelli, call this their “farmette.”

Sandwiched between their home in Rockville, Md., and the circle at the end of a cul-de-sac, the yard is enclosed by a tall fence. The change they want doesn’t include feeding the deer — hence the fence — but it does extend to challenging the long-held suburban ideal of a front yard given over to the conforming lawn.

Lawns are in retreat as gardeners want more space for treasured plants, for rain gardens, for pollinator gardens and even as a place to tuck herbs and other culinary plants in with the ornamentals. Is suburbia ready for a full-blown upfront veggie garden, in all its late-summer raggedness? Eisendrath knows she is ready, and the planet is ready.

Rejecting the lawn and growing your own food organically is a practical if demanding way of reducing your carbon footprint.

“I think there’s going to be more acceptability as people are responding to the challenge of climate change,” she says. “And the fresh food movement has become much more prominent.”

The couple is not under the strictures of a homeowners association, though the turn to self-sufficiency, now in its 11th year, did ruffle some feathers. “We have had people call the county on us early on,” she said. The log bed edging has gone; the wood chip piles, too, and the fence has been fixed up a bit. “There are certain county codes we were made aware of in relatively gentle ways,” she said. “We have learned the system.”

When I visited recently, the corn was high, the tomato vines hulking and fruitful, and the amaranth — weedy if left to seed — ready for harvesting. “It has very tasty leaves,” said Eisendrath, 60.

The garden is shaped by the adornments gardeners use to protect their hard-won crops. Black netting sheaths the broad grapevine at the front of the house, forming a barrier between the clusters of developing fruit and avian raiders. CDs dangle high in the air, twisting in the breeze, to scare off the birds.

On an earlier visit, Libertelli, 62, lifted a tarp to show me logs seeded with mushroom spores (he also forages for mushrooms), and a month before, the couple gathered a garlic harvest — 1,500 bulbs. Some will be returned to the land as seed cloves next month, while the fall crop of peas and brassicas takes shape and the sweet potatoes plump up for harvest.

Libertelli concedes that the yard looks “shaggy” but says that “to grow something from seed and turn it into food strikes me as magical.”

Joining them in the garden this year are their friends Don and Ann English. Don is a bee-keeper with a hive on the edge of the front garden that yielded about 18 kilograms of honey this summer, now bottled or on its way to becoming that favourite medieval libation, mead.

For Eisendrath, the idea that individuals can work to change the world is not some slogan but a way of being. She first gardened when she was in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. The entrance to the house is defined by an arched tunnel supporting kiwi vines, cardinal flowers and a hardy passionflower. Eisendrath reaches up to hold a green orb. “This is my pride and joy,” she said. “My single passion fruit.”

The Washington Post