Aug. 7 column: Front yard vegetable gardens

Do you ever get tired of the amount of water and time it takes to maintain your lawn? Consider growing a vegetable garden there instead! Front yard vegetable gardens are the topic of my garden column in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review. Here’s a link to it: Forget lush lawns — fruits and veggies are this gardener’s growing passion. (or you can read my column lower in this text)

Meet Kathleen Callum

For this column, I had the pleasure of interviewing Master Gardener/Composter/Recycler Kathleen Callum. She and her husband, Robert Sloma, removed most of their front lawn and planted all sorts of veggies and fruits instead. It looks cool and helps feed their family. They are also the volunteer managers of the Fairview & Hemlock community garden.

Kathleen set up the simple display for me on the left, showing some of the different ways they preserve their harvest. Those include jams, canning, lacto-fermentation, and drying.

While researching this story, as well as watching Kathleen’s presentation on this topic, I was disgusted to learn that the amount of area U.S. lawns take up is nearly as much as is in production for growing wheat in this country. When you think about how we can’t even EAT our lawns, it just doesn’t make sense.

I would love to see a movement take place, where folks grow edible plants in place of lawns and become more self-sufficient in producing healthy, organic food to feed their families. Doesn’t that make sense?

Front Yard Vegetable Gardens column:

by Susan Mulvihill

Kathleen Callum and her husband, Robert Sloma, practice what they preach. As volunteer managers of the Hemlock and Fairview community garden, not only are they happy to share their gardening knowledge with anyone who is interested but they also grow their own vegetables and fruits in their front yard.

Their reliance on their garden is actually carrying on an important tradition. In the backyard of their 1928 bungalow, there is a raised bed garden that served as a Victory Garden during World War II.

Callum is a Master Gardener, Master Composter/Recycler and chair of the Master Gardener soils committee. She and Sloma are both archaeologists.

How the Food Not Lawns concept began

While working in another community garden, they’d heard of the Food Not Bombs movement, in which volunteers set up soup kitchens to share food with the hungry. In 1999, some of those volunteers formed Food Not Lawns to become, as their website states, “a global community of avant gardeners, working together to grow and share food, seeds, skills and resources.”

Callum and Sloma have become involved with the group and enjoy teaching others about urban homesteading.

The Callum/Sloma landscape

“Last year, we began converting our front lawn to a high-production garden,” Callum explained.
“Our family grows about 70 to 100 percent of our year’s supply of organic vegetables, in addition to a lot of our own fruit. We also grow produce in the community garden and glean a lot more fruit and nuts thanks to the generosity of our neighbors.”

This year, some of the crops they’re growing include garlic, leeks, parsley, kale, kohlrabi, tomatoes, blueberries, artichokes, chicory, raspberries and basil.

Callum follows polyculture planting practices in which multiple plants are grown together to bring diversity to the bed. For example, legumes are planted to add nitrogen to the soil. Plants with taproots are added to drill down into the soil, making it more permeable.

Neighborhood reactions

How have their neighbors responded to the front yard garden?

“Lots of people like it,” Callum said. “Some of our neighbors are now involved in the community garden and have built a couple of raised beds at their home. Passersby will stop and ask me what a plant is. The bulk of them say it looks beautiful. One lady even squealed on the brakes as she was driving by, just so she could ask me questions about our garden.”

Growing lawns isn’t a sustainable practice

Growing a food garden in place of a front yard lawn makes a lot of sense. As Callum learned through her research, about 80 percent of American households have lawns that, as a whole, occupy about 63,000 square miles of land, or over 40 million acres. That’s nearly the acreage used for growing wheat nationwide. 

“We are farming a crop that we can’t even eat,” she said.

According to the EPA, these lawns collectively use 63 billion gallons of water per week, which ranges from 30 to 60 percent of America’s daily water usage. Those are sobering statistics.

Callum believes it is time to stop that trend, ditch the lawnmower and plant edible crops in place of our lawns.

Kathleen’s tips for homeowners

1. “Evaluate your goals and how best to meet them.” Determine the amount of time and money you and your family are willing to invest. Select an area of your yard that gets the most sunlight and do a soil test.

2. “Grow what you eat, within reason.” Start small and expand as you have interest, time or money. Plant in containers first, then graduate to a small garden or edible landscape.

3. “Start planning to eat locally one year in advance.” Use charts and tables to calculate your family’s food needs and revise them frequently.

4. “Lawn conversion is a challenge so make it easier.” Again, start small and then expand. Consider hiring someone to remove the sod for you or look into sheet-mulching over the lawn for a rich, organic growing medium.

5. “Urban farmers are able to innovate in ways only dreamed of by commercial growers.” Use your energy and creativity to pursue sustainable agriculture to grow the maximum amount of food out of the space you have available.

Let’s get out of the habit of growing lawns and cultivate food and a strong sense of community instead.

Resources

• National Food Not Lawns website: foodnotlawns.com
• Food Not Lawns INW Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/147520383698
• To request a presentation on Food Not Lawns and urban homesteading for your organization, contact Kathleen Callum at (509) 328-2523.
• Learn how to garden with help from the Master Gardeners in Spokane County (extension.wsu.edu/spokane/master-gardener-program/, 509-477-2181) or Kootenai County (https://www.uidaho.edu/extension/county/kootenai/garden/clinic, 208-446-1680).
• “Food Not Lawns” by H.C. Flores (Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 334 pp., $25)