With summer now upon us, gardening season is in
full swing. And that can only mean it’s time for local government
officials around the country to try to outdo one another when it
comes to preventing everyday people from growing fruit and
vegetables in their own yards.
If the proposition that squads of busybody, anti-gardening
bureaucrats are waiting in your thicket, ready to pounce on the
pecks of peppers you might have tended in your yard sounds like
hyperbole, then you clearly have not been paying attention to the
news. In years.
Last summer an Oak Park, Michigan, woman faced more than three
months in jail for keeping a well-manicured edible garden in her
front yard. Oak Park officials charged Julie Bass with a
misdemeanor because in their opinion Ms. Bass’s tomatoes and
vegetables did not
meet the city’s definition of “suitable live plant
material.” The city eventually
dropped the charges.
Last month, Newton, Massachusetts officials brought the
hammer down on a town resident whose handsome hanging tomato
garden ran afoul of a city building ordinance prohibiting the
construction of “swing sets, swimming pools, or sheds” in a front
yard.
“It’s a straight-out violation of the ordinance,’’
said John Lojek, the city’s commissioner of inspectional
services, at the time. (If "inspectional" is a typo, then it is one
that appears to be
repeated all over officialdom in Massachusetts.)
Faced with the prospect of dismantling the structure, the
resident, Eli Katzoff, sought a path to legitimacy.
But Lojek
stood firm. “There’s no path for them.’’
Lojek was right--in practice though not in
principle. Katzoff was
forced to move his plants to the grounds of a nearby
theological seminary.
The
Boston Globe characterized the move as a sign of
“[d]ivine intervention.”
The seminary’s president took a slightly more secular (and less
sanguine) view, calling this a case of “the down side of zoning.”
And, he wondered, “Who can be against tomatoes?”
Bureaucrats, that’s who.
While Oak Park and Newton are wealthy suburban enclaves, urban
and even rural home gardeners are not immune to the flowering
cruelty of local bureaucrats.
Take Denise Morrison of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Last summer Tulsa code
enforcement officers went onto her land and literally
ripped out Morrison’s edible garden.
According to reports, the ordinance at issue stated that “plants
can't be over 12-inches tall unless they're used for human
consumption.”
Morrison, who was unemployed at the time, consumed the wide
variety of plants she grew—including “lemon, stevia, garlic chives,
grapes, strawberries, apple mint, spearmint, peppermint, an apple
tree, walnut tree, pecan trees and much more.”
Last week Morrison fought back,
filing a civil rights lawsuit against the city.
Meanwhile, an Illinois woman is currently
fighting
county officials who won't
permit her or her neighbors keep farm animals on their…
farmland.
Kelli Otting’s garden on her one-acre property hasn’t run afoul
of the county, but her wish to raise chickens and goats on her
farm—located in a rural, unincorporated part of downstate
Illinois—has met opposition from the county land commission.
While Otting’s struggles raise the sometimes controversial issue
of
backyard
chickens clucking in urban areas, the general hurdles faced by
Otting, Morrison, Katzoff, and Bass—and by thousands of others
around the country who simply want to grow their own food—can be
blamed on local zoning boards run amok.
Zoning is intended—say its proponents—to prevent nuisances from
arising. But when zoning itself
becomes the nuisance, and
when it gets in the way of people using their own property how
they’d like--and exactly no one is made better off, save for the
bureaucrats who make and enforce the ordinances--then that piece of
zoning must fall.
Decades before First Lady Michelle Obama planted a highly
visible garden on the White House back lawn, then-First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt’s efforts to plant a similar garden met with
resistance from her own husband’s Department of Agriculture, which
Time magazine
reported (subscription)
at the time was “skeptical of amateur farmers.”
That attitude—having spread like a weed through zoning and
code-enforcement rules that stretch across America—is one worth
combating.
Baylen J. Linnekin, a lawyer, is executive director of
Keep Food Legal, a
Washington, D.C. nonprofit that advocates in favor of food
freedom—the right to grow, raise, produce, buy, sell, cook, eat,
and drink the foods of our own choosing.
This summer, 13-year-old Nathan Duszynski wanted to make some money to help out his disabled parents—his mom has epilepsy and his dad has multiple sclerosis. So he decided to open a hot dog stand. He saved $1,200, mostly money made by mowing lawns and shoveling snow. He checked with the city to make sure he didn't need any licenses or permits, even going to city hall in person with his mom. And then he bought a cart. (Yep, that's hot dog's from Nathan's, for those who are keeping score at home.) 
