This Idiocy Absolutely Must Be Nipped In The Bud

Oak Park, Michigan:

"Their front yard was torn up after replacing a sewer line, so instead of replacing the dirt with grass, one Oak Park woman put in a vegetable garden and now the city is seeing green.

The list goes on: fresh basil, cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, cumbers and more all filling five large planter boxes that fill the Bass family’s front yard.

Julie Bass says, “We thought we’re minding our own business, doing something not ostentatious and certainly not obnoxious or nothing that is a blight on the neighborhood, so we didn’t think people would care very much.”

But some cared very much and called the city. The city then sent out code enforcement.

“They warned us at first that we had to move the vegetables from the front, that no vegetables were allowed in the front yard. We didn’t move them because we didn’t think we were doing anything wrong, even according to city code we didn’t think we were doing anything wrong. So they ticketed us and charged me with a misdemeanor,” Bass said . . .

City code says that all unpaved portions of the site shall be planted with grass or ground cover or shrubbery or other suitable live plant material. Tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are what Basses see as suitable.

However, Oak Park’s Planning and Technology Director Kevin Rulkowski says the city disagrees. He says, “If you look at the dictionary, suitable means common. You can look all throughout the city and you’ll never find another vegetable garden that consumes the entire front yard.”

So what is suitable? From another local news report:

. . . we asked Rulkowski why it’s not suitable.

“If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster’s dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what’s common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers,” he said.

God forbid your yard doesn’t include beautiful trees, bushes and flowers. It’s your job, Oak Park citizens, to give Kevin Rulkowski pretty things to look at. According to Bass’s blog, she’s demanding her right to a jury trial. So the city plans to throw the book at her."

I've had a garden every place I've lived for the past thirty years. I do it the exact same way as the folks above, building raised beds in a tasteful manner that as the plants grow is every bit as lovely and pleasing as shrubbery and trees, especially if you put some flowers in with the vegetables.

But stupid mindsets in the snoop and control crowd are far more destructive than just concentrating on the mere looks of a garden. The jackass planning commissar above is living on another planet. As we slide deeper into this depression hell hole, growing your own food will turn from being a satisfying, recreational luxury into a fiscal necessity, especially later this year when food shortages hit at the same time hyperinflation kicks in. Growing your own food also means you can avoid radiation contaminated stuff in supermarkets where no one seems to know the origin of the food they sell. I'm going to predict plot gardens will become so popular and necessary that houses that have them will instantly become more valuable whether to sell or rent.

But it gets a lot deeper than that, really. When you see a raised bed plot you should assume the
gardener is a lot more aware of what she/he is doing. Soil in a bed is a living thing, just like the plants that grow in it, unlike chemically sprayed, fertilized and sterile lawns. The mantra goes like this - you feed the soil, the soil feeds the plants, and the plants feed you. Doing it this way is an act of love and over the course of years the soil in the beds becomes incredibly rich and vibrant with life of all kinds, from earthworms to microbes. It's an astoundingly rewarding and positive activity, and you're hard pressed in this sick society to find any optimism that comes close. So of course it's antithetical to dumbfuck pink flamingo mouthbreathers.

last year's burst