Neighborhood Covenants Are Over– If You Want It…

Well, HOWDY!!! I’m Monkeyfister, and this is my first post here. (Hi Monkeyfister) If you are not familiar with me, I can be a bit acerbic, but, oh, so friendly, once you get past my style of writing, and language (I am an old Sailor and Stagehand– my language is a bit salty), and get into comments exchange. I’ve been organic gardening for over a decade, on and off, and know quite a lot about natural pest control, and soil health. I currently live in West Tennessee, but lived most of my life in Michigan. I’m getting to know an awful lot about gardening in the Mid-South, and am eager to share the knowledge. I like to Can, Freeze and Preserve my vegetables and fruits, and enjoy sharing that knowledge as well. I hunt as well, and am about to get into raising chickens. I have little use for Corporations, Processed Foods, or the strictures of recent Suburban Developments– known as Covenants. If you’re stuck in such a community, now is your time to act to break them down to the point of rendering them void. It’s time to tell the Neighborhood Nazis that you bought a home and Property in order to LIVE FREE, and that their rules no longer are applicable. Here’s the basic way to do it… The key, as always, is building community and friendship with neighbors. Show them the way, and share seeds, plants, and knowledge.

The Basic Premise: At this point in the collapse of Real Estate values, there is no logical way that a neighbor can argue that YOUR planting of edible plants in your front yard is bringing down THEIR Property Value (the whole point of these stupid Covenants in the first place) Property Value Collapse is happening worldwide… not just in your cul-de-sac– zillow.com will prove your side of the argument. And Go HERE ( http://hotpads.com ), type in your Zip Code, select foreclosures. Print out copies of your neighbors’ and areas’ reports, today, and save them for when that uppity bastard neighbor lodges a bitch with the Neighborhood Nazi Association.

Their petty bitches will never hold up in any court, or Neighborhood Nazi Tribunal. Screw ‘em. Sympathetic neighbors will throng to your side if you plant your edible front yard attractively. Those people who are SO HEAVY about those Covenants are going to end up starving themselves out of the neighborhood. Go ahead and push them out, or teach them that eating is better than starving… TEACH THEM how to make an edible garden attractive.

There is NOTHING to stop you now. Just don’t till up the yard and make an ugly, weedy, row garden. Make nice, orderly raised beds or island beds. Lots of color and useful flowers are key.

Make your edible plantings attractive and intersperse them with pretty flowers and herbs. Make a little trellis arbor and plant Scarlet Runner Pole Beans with some Morning Glories or Trumpet Vines and Tomatoes (don’t put the Pole beans right next to the Tomatoes– they hate each other a few flower vines between will suffice ~1 foot). Instead of Decorative Cabbages– plant edge rows of Savoy or Purple Cabbages. Ground cover with Thyme and Parsley and Oregano… Plant Zucchini near to an Elephant Ear plant or other low, broad-leafed plant. Use a little bit of decorative subterfuge, and nobody will notice.

As I wrote to Kate in comments at my place (with some additional info here):

No one is going to notice or care if you’ve got edibles growing with pretty annual flowers and plants, Kate. At this point, I’d expect that most people in your neighborhood are wondering how to simply deal with the bills.

Once you see people letting their lawns go a bit, you can rest assured that they are not going to be eyeballing bush beans or tomatoes in your flower beds.

Trust me on this.

Those that DO notice, will start following your example, and then the Covenants become unenforceable. Next step will be Backyard Chickens.

Push.

Gently.

Artfully.

They are trying to prevent ugly row-gardens in the front yard… If it looks nice– they’ll never bother you.

The key is to render those Covenants moot– null and void– and have everyone planting edibles in the yard before a recovery.

Screw those Covenants– they are WRONG in every way, and now they are pointless and counterintuitive.

Some basic planting spacings– Nine bush beans per square foot. Four lettuces per square foot. 16 onions or beets or turnips per square foot. One Cabbage, Pepper, Eggplant, per square foot (with eggplant or peppers– fill the rest of the square foot with lettuces). One Tomato per square foot grown up string* or an arbor (fill the rest of the foot with basil or carrots). Two Cucumbers, Pole Beans, Squash Vines per square foot– grow on arbors or strings. Just read the seed pack, and plant at the spacing where it says, “Thin To X Inches…” Put one or two seeds at THAT spacing, and you won’t have to thin later. Who wants to kill a little plant? This takes that “playing God” pain off of you, and keeps your garden pretty, and functional. Remember– in the front yard, just make it pretty, and intersperse with flowers.

It’s amazing what can be grown in a very, very small space. You can grow carrots, beans, potatoes, radishes, lettuces, ANYTHING in containers or window boxes. I’ll post on growing potatoes in containers in the next few days– I am doing it right now. Just follow those THIN TO spacings, and you cannot go wrong, and your neighbors will never notice or care that you’re growing food in your front yard, on your porch, in hanging baskets, or wherever…

The bottom line is this–

Neighborhood Covenants are OVER. The arguments are dead. They cannot hold up. I don’t know how, or a more better way to say it. The idea was STUPID to begin with, and now it is DONE. LET IT GROW– and EAT!

Monkeyfister’s Adage: “Rules are made to be broken. Laws are to be obeyed. Stupid Laws are to be quietly disregarded.”

Move NOW to kill those stupid covenants. They serve no purpose, and are only hurting you and your community. Make your edible front yard attractive, be creative and imaginative, and your front yard will become a selling point, and not a liability.

* — Make a nice frame out of conduit, two vertical legs, and a header-bar with some 90-degree angle couplings– or whatever seems nice within your budget. Run a hemp string about 6 inches parallel above the soil. Run vertical strings from that bottom string to the top pipe wherever you have a plant, and train them up it. Use Natural Fibers, and they can be composted in the back yard. You can get upscale– I am placing 4″x4″ posts at the corners of my garden beds, and putting 1/2″ pipe at the bottom, and 6′ up between the posts. I run the strings vertically between the horizontal pipes. My neighbors come by to ask how I am doing what I do now. Last year, they were sort of hostile to my gardening.

One of my neighbors has started to garden in my way, now, and he was the UPPITY one–seriously concerned that I wasn’t pushing a “nice grass lawn.” He doesn’t know that I intentionally sowed the 100 pounds of clover seed in my yard, that has now spread to his yard, just yet. Heh– it crowded out the Bermuda Grass, and now I only have to mow my 2 acres every couple of months, instead of every week. One day, he’ll learn to appreciate that clover. I hope…

Grow now. Apologize and push back later… AFTER you’ve got a harvest in.
Cheers! Nice to get to know you!

–mf