What You Will Learn at YardEats.com
by Paul Hart & Juliet Webster
YardEats.com is a site that will inform you of many relevant topics about food and health. We are especially interested in the movement to plant gardens in front and back yards across America, and also to explore the possibilities and philosophy of returning back to the small farm as a solution to today’s many civil problems. Along with this must be the end of the monster corporate farms that have created virtual monopolies in farming, and the use of anti-human so-called GMO seeds.
We remember watching an interesting BBC program called “The Power of Nightmares.” This was a 3 part series that explored what happened at the end of the Cold War. The Anglo-British Empire, now without an enemy, physical or ideological, was desperate to shore up what could have been a disastrous collapse of their military-industrial complex and the billions of dollars being made from it. So an enemy was basically “created” out of a small group of radical Muslims. This group, originally called “Muhajadeem” freedom fighters, was financed by America and Britain to overthrow the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After the Soviets were defeated, the CIA, and the other alphabet soup agencies labeled these rag-tag fighters as a big threat to the Anglo-American Empire, and a huge program of wars, armaments, and military adventures followed, still continuing to this day. One of the early Arab rebels who wrote books condemning the dictatorship in Egypt, was a school teacher named Khatab. He came to the United States in the 1950s as an exchange student.
The things he saw and disapproved of are of no importance to this website, with one exception. He made a brilliant observation about Americans and their obsessive love for their lawns. It’s one of those things that one sees everyday, but it is so pervasive and common, that it goes unnoticed. When is the last time you have thought about the subject? Probably never. But when you really think about it, why in the world should everyone have a lawn? It makes no sense. It is a huge waste of space, a waste of billions of gallons of water across the country to keep the grass “green”, and it has led to the immigration into the U.S. of millions of illegal immigrants, armies of them, employed to mow, trim, water, and care for our stupid lawns. (Click here to read the article on the History of Lawns)
Lawns were not an issue until some Gardening Clubs, probably egged on by corporate interests launched a massive campaign to promote lawns. Here’s a snip from the History of Lawns:
It wasn’t until The American Garden Club stepped in. Through contests and other forms of publicity, they convinced home owners that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful and healthy lawn. So effective was the club’s campaign that lawns were soon the accepted form of landscaping. The garden club further stipulated that the appropriate type of lawn was “a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged.” America thus entered the age of lawn care.
America now spends over 17 billion dollars on outdoor home improvements, much of it for lawns. The idea of lawns is so pervasive that if you don’t have one, many municipalities will actually cite you and fine you for not keeping a nice lawn. The “Lawn Police” patrol neighborhoods looking for poorly kept lawns or someone who would dare to put a food garden in their front yard. This is actually insane behavior. It is also a violation of basic private property rights. We are now living in a gigantic nut house, our mad overlords have created what news pundit Alex Jones calls a “Prison Planet”.
Yet, with looming food shortages, shouldn’t we be planting our front yards with food gardens and fruit trees? It would be a much better use of the land than a wasteful lawn, that sucks up water and maintenance for no reason. The so-called “gardeners” who come out every week to mow the lawns could be put to better use in planting food. Or better yet, Americans could get off their fat asses and do it themselves. Maybe the threat of starvation will do it. But first they will have to repeal all the thousands of municipal ordinances that prohibit front yard food gardens. Click here to access the Front Yard Food Garden site.
YardEats.com also explores new technology and ways to grow food, such as “bucket gardening,” and “mobile gardening.” People living in apartments and condos should be doing some food growing. We are also proponents of returning to the days when America had a seven year food supply, called a Strategic Food Supply, just in case. It will have to be a much fatter supply for seven years, just to feed all the illegal “gardeners” who are making a living from lawn care.