For the Love of Lettuce

"Another Pleasant Valley Sunday; charcoal burning everywhere.  Rows of houses that are all the same.  And no one seems to care."  

                               ---words and music by Gerry Goffin and Carole King

It's hard to know whether to be heart-sick, angry, or simply embarrassed.  Because of a few complaints, the West Des Moines City Council has agreed to consider a ban on all "front yard vegetable gardens."  After all, as the article in today's Des Moines Register points out,
"Cabbages, once picked, leave holes. Squash leaves can get scabby-looking, and a blighted tomato plant is downright ugly...  Leggy sweet corn plants can seem scraggly and disproportional, especially in contrast to a well-manicured lawn."

And God knows that the situation is urgent.  As one concerned citizen puts it, “What’s to prevent them or anyone else now from, this spring, bulldozing their entire front yard and planting a garden?  If you don’t have anything in your ordinance to prevent this, I could see that happening.”

Exactly.  And what could be worse than an entire front yard full of...food?  Food that could be...well...eaten -- stretching grocery dollars, saving gas, and quite possibly improving our diet?  Yes, that all sounds like quite the public nemesis.

Can we just stop and have a reality check?  I suspect that this might be one of those moments when my Dad would say, "the world's going to hell and we're arguing over tomatoes."  Surely there are more mountainous issues for a community to be wrestling with than such puny molehills as this -- perhaps educational excellence or gun violence or access to health care or simply public health!  Moreover, at a time in our agricultural history when we ought to be encouraging everyone who has any plot of sunny soil available to sow a few seeds and not only participate in but contribute to the food supply, the last thing we should be doing is erecting impediments.

It's hard to know if this proposed ordinance stems from a hyper-carnivorial hostility to all things vegetable, or an overly steroidal devotion to some blandly homogenous suburban "aesthetic", or a subtly obfuscated slap at the poor who some West Des Moinians prefer to believe don't exist within their city limits.  Regardless, the notion is too repugnantly silly to even be funny -- let alone take up precious City Council time.

On the off-chance that reason does not eventually prevail in West Des Moines, I am modestly prepared to plow into the lunacy with the creation of a "Vegetable Rescue League" that would provide safe-haven on our humble acreage to any allium, brassica, night-shade, pepper or edible root forced to flee the city limits as horticultural refugees -- sort of a "green" Red Cross offering soil sanctuary for salads-in-process.

Compassion, and I like to think "sanity", in action.  That, and my little mission to prove the song wrong.  Somebody does "seem to care."