I’m not a fan of grass. You know, lawns. Homogeneous ground covering, cut to be strangely level and squared off. I think it looks really unnatural… really, well, fake… it’s real but doesn’t look real (don’t even get me started on astroturf… shudder).

And all the maintenance, the gas that’s burned to keep cutting the stuff and the crazy amounts of water used to keep it green… it’s absurd.

So I was happy to find an entry in Dwell Blog about Fritz Haeg’s “Edible Estates Garden” at Descanso Gardens in Southern California. One one side he planted a standard lawn and on the other a vegetable garden. Ten months later the lawn looks, well, like a lawn while the vegetable garden had exploded into an abundance of colors and textures as different plans filled in the space.

I talk a lot about how simple ideas can yield amazing results, about how doing things a little differently can make a huge difference and a huge improvement. I consider vegetable gardens in place if lawns to be a no-brainer. And if veggies are a little too “on the farm,” how about an herb garden or a flower garden or a low water xeriscape. Instead of that lowest common denominator of yard plantings, grass.

Dwell Blog has some great pictures of the Edible Estates Garden.

Here in San Francisco we have a vegetable garden too. It’s in the middle of the Civic Center. Right in front of City Hall. It’s fantastic and I really hope it not just becomes permanent but is expanded into the rest of the plaza now occupied by wet and muddy lawns.

Opened July 1st, San Francisco’s veggie garden was planted by Slow Food. According to their site, Slow Food is “a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people”™s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.”

At the opening San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said, “It”™s about our suburban areas being connected to our rural areas, and being connected to our urban areas. This is an urban setting, a dense urban environment, one of the densest urban centers in America, yet here we are planting gardens.”

It looks great, it’s fun to walk around and it produces vegetables. No brainer!