Why don't Americans plant trees and bushes of stuff that they can eat in their houses instead of having useless grass?
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I know exactly what you mean, I lived in a small town in Eastern Europe and the streets are literally lined with fruit trees and everyone has a walnut tree in their yard, it’s literally free food. The cherries were the best.
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We do? Some ppl dont, we have sugarcane, oranges, lemons, eggplants, peppers, and I forget the rest, my dad/grandpa are more into gardening. Its just not realistic to do a lot, cheaper and a lot faster to go the grocery storec more variety, hoemgrown stuff is ususlly more of an addon.
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I’m tryin’, man. Fruit bearing plants take a lot of work compared to the manicured suburban steriscape. They’re not super easy to grow (depending on where you live), require pruning and fertilizer, soil amendment, and unfortunately pesticides or fencing if you don’t want insects or deer destroying your hard work.
That’s way more effort than most people want to expend. HOAs or even local ordinances may also restrict what can be grown.
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Every year the local squirrels steal the veggies we plant
This has been my experience as well, along with raccoons decimating all but one season's attempt at a water garden.
We get them all. Deer, birds, chipmunks. The entire garden needs to be protected by hardware cloth. The chipmunks got through the original chicken wire we had. We had to enclose the top as they climbed over. Plus the small birds eat any berries. A constant battle to be able to harvest anything.
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Every year the local squirrels steal the veggies we plant
This has been my experience as well, along with raccoons decimating all but one season's attempt at a water garden.
When I first started gardening I had this idealistic view of, "I will just grow a surplus, if the animals take some I will still have enough." Nope. They eat everything, to the ground. They can do it in one night. There are different pests that specialize in eating the seeds, the roots, the stems, the leaves, and the fruit. Deer will "sample" entire plants just to confirm they don't like them. Squirrels will take a single bite out of every tomato. Bears will push down an entire fruit tree just to get one fruit. Energy is scarce in nature and these organisms aren't fucking around.
Took me awhile to finally admit that barriers aren't just nice, they are required.
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I’m tryin’, man. Fruit bearing plants take a lot of work compared to the manicured suburban steriscape. They’re not super easy to grow (depending on where you live), require pruning and fertilizer, soil amendment, and unfortunately pesticides or fencing if you don’t want insects or deer destroying your hard work.
That’s way more effort than most people want to expend. HOAs or even local ordinances may also restrict what can be grown.
I don't know what your experience with gardening is, so I might be preaching to the choir here. But if it helps, No-Dig Gardening is a method that lets nature do a lot of the hard work for you.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/soil-composts-mulches/no-dig-gardening
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I don't know what your experience with gardening is, so I might be preaching to the choir here. But if it helps, No-Dig Gardening is a method that lets nature do a lot of the hard work for you.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/soil-composts-mulches/no-dig-gardening
I’m not super-experienced, but this is absolutely a viable method if you have somewhat decent soil to start with. Unfortunately where I live it’s a ton of clay, so getting the soil to a usable state absolutely requires digging. It’s just as much work to dig and amend vs build on top and import soil.
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Because this is illegal in most of America. You would be fined and the city would probably send a crew out to rip it all up and give you the invoice if you defied it and left it that way.
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Because this is illegal in most of America. You would be fined and the city would probably send a crew out to rip it all up and give you the invoice if you defied it and left it that way.
That’s a bit extreme? I think that you are correct that this may be the case in front yards depending on location, but backyards are usually fine for whatever barring some HOA BS or unusual local rules.
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That’s a bit extreme? I think that you are correct that this may be the case in front yards depending on location, but backyards are usually fine for whatever barring some HOA BS or unusual local rules.
I’ve seen this happen before in real life so extreme or not, it’s definitely the norm in upstate New York at the very least. Had the city called on us while we were out of the country and we came back to all 6 of our small fruit trees dug up and tracks all over the front lawn from an excavator and a $2500 bill from the city.
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I’ve seen this happen before in real life so extreme or not, it’s definitely the norm in upstate New York at the very least. Had the city called on us while we were out of the country and we came back to all 6 of our small fruit trees dug up and tracks all over the front lawn from an excavator and a $2500 bill from the city.
So front yard? Yeah, not super surprised at that. I’ve heard plenty of stories about front yard cultivators running into problems with the city. I live in a more rural/urban mixed area so it’s a lot more forgiving. Plenty of people here have apples or other fruit trees in the front yard - not aggressively farming the yard, just as part of the plantings.
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Growing crops is quite a bit of cost and effort and time. I have a little garden, but it's not like you just plant some seeds and you're all done.
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HOAs say “ew no that’s for the poors” and good luck finding a house that’s not in an HOA within a reasonable commute to your job
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I’m tryin’, man. Fruit bearing plants take a lot of work compared to the manicured suburban steriscape. They’re not super easy to grow (depending on where you live), require pruning and fertilizer, soil amendment, and unfortunately pesticides or fencing if you don’t want insects or deer destroying your hard work.
That’s way more effort than most people want to expend. HOAs or even local ordinances may also restrict what can be grown.
European garden with some ten different berries/fruit trees and bushes - no work needed, they just do their thing (when they are big enough.) Rotate about one every three years, sometimes move some berries from one place to another.
Strawberries are a ton of work at the end of the year (not the little wild ones though,) don't do them unless you really love them.
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You’re talking about a country that has no universal healthcare, record gun violence, divisive civil political unrest, low education and health compared to other developed countries, record wealth inequality, lies and propaganda coming from their federal government, policies that attack allies and work with dictatorships… and people are wondering why they can’t plant trees instead of grass?
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HOAs say “ew no that’s for the poors” and good luck finding a house that’s not in an HOA within a reasonable commute to your job
...pretty much this: you'll be fined for anything other than well-groomed grass growing in your yard...
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In, or in the yard of?
If you mean in the yard of their houses, it goes back to the days of aristocracy. Having land you don't use for food was a form of conspicuous consumption, and you had sports grow up around stretches of short grass as a result, like golf and polo. The former is still synonymous with the well-off, even.
Then you have to skip ahead to the 1960's in America, where the "mid-century modern" philosophy of urban planning gains prominence. The idea was to get people out of the crowded, Victorian-style slums - which we might find quaint in hindsight, but at the time were very stigmatised. This extended to a certain disdain for cities and buildings in general, even - more nature was better. So, where do you put people? In tiny little rural estates modeled on the ones popular with aristocrats, separated by zoning laws from the other sections of the city.
The vision was that people would get home from their 9-5 jobs in the commercial-only zones in their very own car, and would hang out outside enjoying their government-mandated leisure time. The urban planners of the time probably pictured a giant croquet course going up and down a residential street, and the all-white 3.5 kid families that live there sitting outside on lawn chairs, playing friendly games against each other. These "white picket fence" suburbs had lawns, then, because you couldn't have semi-rural domestic bliss without them, according to architects who graduated Harvard in 1920.
In practice, of course, none of that happened. Like so many other tidy ideas it failed to predict how the general public would interact with it. I've been to plenty of places like that. You know the names of your neighbor, but not much else about them, and the people a few doors down are suspect of being pedophiles or violent drug dealers. That fence line is sacred, each house becomes an island, and you're frightfully dependent on driving to get anywhere you can do basic errands. And that's not even getting into the racial issues that came out of it.
Now, in the 21st century, people assume houses have always had lawns, and messing with that formula irritates the local NIMBYs. New ideas become rigid tradition, and it falls to the next generation to question them. Hopefully we will, but it will take a moment.
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HOAs say “ew no that’s for the poors” and good luck finding a house that’s not in an HOA within a reasonable commute to your job
My HOA:
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Bugs, pests, and animals, at least where I live. Unless you build a green house, clear the yard of all other foliage, or somehow fortify your garden, only produce with natural defenses like peppers will make it to harvest. However, I am jealous of my friends on the west coast, who don't really have to worry about bugs or other critters eating from their fruit trees just passively growing in their yard.
