If today is anything like yesterday, you may have a few hours amidst the rain to get outside and start work on your spring garden.
If you do have a spring garden, and if today is like yesterday, and for some reason the placement of your garden is up for a vote, I’d like to vote that you move it to your front yard.
There are two simple reasons:
- I like to see what other people are planting, and apparently it’s considered creepy to sneak into other people’s backyard.
- It builds community.
Regarding the second point, there’s this: we dug up our grass and moved our garden out front several years ago. At the time, I thought the point was to spend less time mowing. It turns out, that’s the least of the pleasures. The greatest of the pleasures is all the people we’ve met.
It turns out, when you’re in your backyard weeding your garden and one of your neighbors walks by, they just walk by. If you’re in your front yard weeding your garden, they may stop to chat. If they stop to chat, you get to know them. When you get to know them, you build community. One, two, three. Just that.
I write about this pretty much every year (e.g., see Go Out Front from 2010, when I was apparently a bit more poetic), because it’s important to me. I hope you’ll give it some thought.
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Yep. I did the same thing some years ago. I love being in the front garden and watching the world go by. The only drawback for me is the 4 year old boy who lives in my house and looks menacingly with his squirt gun at passers by! I promise he IS well trained and follows the “no squirting at people” rule!
we, too, took over the planting strip. we split the 40′ between ornamental and edible. i’d have preferred to have gone 100% edible, but I lost the battle.
I appreciate the neighbors supporting the efforts. it is fun.
Having researched a paper on “lead in the urban garden” in the 1970s, I am wary of eating quite a few vegetables from next to a street. Some are better than others in their uptake of toxics. However, I love to look at all the gardens and very much believe in fostering community!
Lead in gasoline was phased out beginning in the mid-1960’s. There’s a chart showing the gradual decline of its presence in gasoline and blood levels here: http://www.radford.edu/wkovarik/ethylwar/overview.html.
Net-net: yes, it was a problem in the 1970’s, but it isn’t now.
So as long as you don’t use much soil that was there in the ’70s, should be OK?
This issue with soils, both front yard and backyard, especially in Wallingford is our proximity to Gasworks Park. The toxicity levels from years of coal gasification at the location have left soils unhealthy. Raised beds are the best answer.
Here’s where I plug the importance of soil testing both if you’re concerned about toxic materials and for better resource use and successful gardening in general.
The University of Massachusetts has cheap ($10) basic testing that includes lead. This is who I use and I highly recommend them. I would spring for organic matter testing if you’ve never had it done before. (It’s $5 more.)
http://soiltest.umass.edu/
The King County Conservation District has (limited) free testing for Seattle residents, but does not include any toxics tests. They’re available, but not free.
http://www.kingcd.org/pro_far_soi.htm
Call or email the city’s Garden Hotline for more sources for soil testing.
http://gardenhotline.org/
The front yard garden is awesome. When we bought our place last year, our first order of business was to tear up the bark and boring plant “landscaping” and put in two raised beds (a great way to avoid worry about leaching/chemicals/lead – raised beds with organic compost/topsoil/potting mix). Working in the garden was a great way to first meet, then get to know our neighbors, and there’s nothing better than going out your front door to harvest your dinner. Plus, thanks to an extra mild winter, we’re still eating the arugula, lettuce, and chard we planted last fall!
i worked with a woman at the UW a few years back who had done a study on contaminants in the soil of seattle parking strips and the results were not what you would expect – there were hardly any at all, and certainly not at dangerous levels.
@abc: This study?
http://depts.washington.edu/uwbg/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Murphy_D2_slides.pdf