Why We Should All Grow Gardens

This pretty front-yard garden is close to the Gowanus Canal. 

In his latest column for the New York Times, the excellent Mark Bittman made a pretty compelling case for giving up on grass. I want to give him a big high-five. I'm all for replacing lawns with sprawling flower and vegetable beds. Here's why:

It's not as though lawns are much less work than gardens. People spend a lot of time growing that green stuff. You have to mow it, rake it, weed it, water it, and sometimes even bring out the big guns: fancy aerators or fertilizers. It seems like a lot of effort for minimal payoff. (Unless your dog needs a place to pee...in which case, leave a little patch of lawn, but know that he'll probably prefer to do his business in your flower beds just because he can.)

Plus, gardens are not inherently super fussy. Last summer, I wrote about edible ornamentals (like those frilly cabbages planted all over NYC sidewalks). They're pretty, low-maintenence, and definitely chomp-able. Kale is also gorgeous and grows like crazy; it's basically just a very delicious weed. If you can keep your grass from turning brown and crunchy, you can grow a kale crop--and it probably tastes better.

And growing a garden--even a dinky one--could have major environmental and public health benefits. Bittman says that converting even 10% of our lawns to gardens could meet almost half of our country's demand for fresh produce. That's a pretty staggering statistic! Plus, eating hyper-locally reduces our carbon footprint. (Added bonus: you can pluck a snack from your backyard without having to put on real clothes and get your butt to a store.)

But here's the main reason I think we should stick our hands in the dirt: gardening forces us to confront truths about ourselves that it's often easy to ignore. Gardens seem to be designed: you make a plan, decide which seeds will go where, you check up on them, you coax them into the sunlight, and you hope for the best. Sometimes they flourish; sometimes, despite your best efforts, they never germinate. Other times, you grow something lovely, only to have it infested by pests (or accidentally trampled). The design isn't fool-proof, and you have to be flexible and creative. We can try to control nature; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I know: I'm a girl who likes a good metaphor. But it's a lesson worth learning and relearning again and again: things don't necessarily happen the way we want them to. Yep, I'm still kind of mourning my cherry tomato crop that never grew, but I'm proud of my pretty coleus and velvety dusty miller. And I can't wait to try again.