Because having a big yard of grass that you have to mow every week while using up gasoline is the American dream and a flex for some reason.
You think we own shit? Lawns are the landlord’s landscaping equivalent of white paint: inoffensive but dull and useless
There is a pretty great website called Falling fruit to map trees and other plants that you can pick from freely.
I checked out my closest two locations on there. They were both dumpsters… “Best to come after midnight”.
Not what I was expecting…
Hey. Thank you for sharing this.
Websites like this are the good part of the internet.
Canadian here, that’s getting more and more common over here. There’s a ton of HOA bullshit here too but I’ve been seeing more and more food gardening in Vancouver, but that might also be because food is expensive as fuuuck here.
It’s a stupid reason. Historically, if you were a peasant and had been granted access to land, you grew food or herbs. If however you were a lord, you got your food from your peasants. You had no need to grow your own food. So they could afford to grow lawns as a sign of wealth.
This has transferred across into the modern psyche. Lawns are a way of saying “i’m so rich, i don’t have to worry about sustenance. In fact i’ll throw money at it to maintain this slab of green rather than have it provide food, or shade.”
This is the correct answer. So many US’isms are bourgeois / aristocratic imitation.
Cars / wasteful transportation, lawns, sprawled out cities, high amounts of meat consumption, vacation homes / timeshares / exotic vacations, having servants, etc. These are things that are only possible for countries with huge amounts of land and resources, and not sustainable or doable for most of the world.
It could also be seen as rising standards of living, and aristocrats were optimizing their advantage before the standards rose for everyone due to cheap energy availability.
Saying people consume meat to mimic the rich is a little silly.
@Turturtley @Confidant6198 Its worse, because, actually, even if they wanted to, most Americans are under the tyrannical rule of a Homeowners Association (talk about liberty huh) that forces them to plant grass, and can fine them a shit ton of money if they do otherwise
It’s funny how this has come full circle - many people garden (in their back yards) to show they have the free time to do so.
americans already do this i see it all the time
Some cities actually mandate lawns. My city has code enforcement officials who have to go around and make sure that lawns are kept to a certain standard. I live in California and at some point these codes were relaxed to deal with water shortages (go figure) so we don’t actually have to maintain our lawn. It’s part of practices focused around preserving high housing costs (which I think are absolutely terrible).
I mean some of us hate grass so much we started a huge reddit community about it that made it’s way too lemmy.
I’m tryin’, man. Fruit bearing plants take a lot of work compared to the manicured suburban steriscape. They’re not super easy to grow (depending on where you live), require pruning and fertilizer, soil amendment, and unfortunately pesticides or fencing if you don’t want insects or deer destroying your hard work.
That’s way more effort than most people want to expend. HOAs or even local ordinances may also restrict what can be grown.
I don’t know what your experience with gardening is, so I might be preaching to the choir here. But if it helps, No-Dig Gardening is a method that lets nature do a lot of the hard work for you.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/soil-composts-mulches/no-dig-gardening
I’m not super-experienced, but this is absolutely a viable method if you have somewhat decent soil to start with. Unfortunately where I live it’s a ton of clay, so getting the soil to a usable state absolutely requires digging. It’s just as much work to dig and amend vs build on top and import soil.
Look into native plants. There are so many edible things that you can just leave in the wasteland that is your yard and they’ll take over. Here in Tennessee we have pawpaws and maypops for fruit, tomatoes that pop up randomly, garden greens like wood sorrel and lambs quarters, and a bunch of other things that absolutely take over given half a chance. Sure, if you try and grow the seed packets from your local Lowes you’ll have issues with pests and whatnot, but there is so much more food out there than these varieties.
Absolutely. Already have a couple.
European garden with some ten different berries/fruit trees and bushes - no work needed, they just do their thing (when they are big enough.) Rotate about one every three years, sometimes move some berries from one place to another.
Strawberries are a ton of work at the end of the year (not the little wild ones though,) don’t do them unless you really love them.
Littering your yard with food attracts things like rats, raccoons, squirrels, etc, which destroy property and infrastructure, spread disease, and cause injury to people and pets. I’m not saying I’m against fruit trees, but I do understand people who are. It’s a legitimate concern. Some areas even have things like boars or bears which are extremely dangerous.
I’m also curious with the way you can sue people in the US what would happen if someone becomes sick after eating one of your fruits. I imagine it varies by state.
Reading this made me even happier I don’t have to live there
Trees in general do all of those horrible things you mentioned.
I don’t think that’s the case, but trees in general are sadly not common in American landscaping, at least in my experience with urban areas. You tend to see newer (90’s+) homes with very small trees that suggest the idea of nature without providing any shade or other benefits. I keep hearing about people buying older houses with big lovely trees and having them immediately cut down because it’s disturbing the driveway or they’re afraid of it falling in a storm. I think insurance costs may have something to do with these concerns, but it’s really sad regardless.
In California they’re constantly giving out these little saplings that will grow into very functional and deep-rooted shade trees, but no one wants them because they aren’t pretty and drop needles.
Dropped fruit all over the ground really encourages rats though.
My mum got a house super cheap when I was young because it had a “rat problem” it also had a peach tree in the back yard that the owner didnt pick up after. We removed literal garbage bags of peach pits from the roof space and crawl spaces of that house and garage.
Chopped the peach tree down (it wasnt a healthy tree anyway) and the problem basically disappeared in days.
And I’ve found loads of walnut shells in nooks and crannies. I’m not going to cut a black walnut down.
Buildings need to be built properly to exclude animals regardless.
Not possible. Nature finds a way.
I lived in a small city (~30k) in the middle of rural texas growing up, and our main wildlife was deer, squirrels, possums, foxes, armadillos, javalinas, and birds, although we also had the occasional ratsnake or raccoons or skunks.
We didn’t really have fruit trees, but we did have plenty of pecans and several gardens of all kinds of veggies, a fig tree that never seemed to bloom, and some assorted berrying bushes.
We never experienced these plagues of infrastructural damage and diseases and hurt pets (4 cats and 2 dogs in total) that you describe. Idk where people get these horror stories from.
I suppose it can happen, but that’s probably in areas where such a yard is the only safe space for wildlife and people don’t live with nature as a daily part of their lives.
I s2g cityfolk act like getting brushed up against by a non-domesticated critter will give them an instant prion disorder.
People are afraid of everything now. If you let your kids make their own way to school instead of driving them they may be kidnapped and murdered by the nonces hidden around every corner in your city, but also they may grow up to be independent self-reliant people.
that’s probably in areas where such a yard is the only safe space for wildlife and people don’t live with nature as a daily part of their lives.
I think this is the case. In urban areas you get the rats and such nesting directly in people’s homes because there’s nowhere else for them to be, thanks to the absolute miles of pavement. When I’ve lived in more rural areas you would see a lot of animals all the time, but everyone was pretty much minding their own business. I think habitat destruction is the real problem.
This. Fruit trees are loads of work that most amateur gardeners don’t know how to deal with them or have the time to deal with them. Gardening and farming is a shitload of work and was only made cheap and easy through the marvel of modern technology. You don’t just plant shit and get to eat lol
Grass lawns as a concept came from Europe as a symbol of wealth. If you could afford a large green lawn, you were likely rich.
Zoning laws in a lot of places.
The 50s happened.
And for whatever the fuck reason, they wanted houses like the ones found in pre-1789 France
too busy eating avocado toast
Probably against HOA rules in many places.
Ok, but why?
Ismt that the universal question with moet things americans do these days? ;-)
The real answer is because in America rich people buy houses, and then create HOAs in the housing deeds and contracts to force all future owners to maintain the house in a way that will increase the neighborhood property value forever.
HOAs exclusively fight to make houses more and more “valuable” since housing is a financial investment here
Thank you. So not having a proper garden increases the value?
Most older (white) Americans think having any sort of enjoyment or color in anything is “gay”. Hence why so many American die of heart disease, because eating an apple is basically like giving a blowjob.
Because of 18th century French aristocracy, no shit.
