The Grass Mafia

The Agitator got the ball rolling by picking up the story from a Fox affiliate in Detroit : Oak Park Woman Faces 93-Days in Jail For Planting Vegetable Garden

Their front yard was torn up after replacing a sewer line, so instead of replacing the dirt with grass, one Oak Park woman put in a vegetable garden and now the city is seeing green.

The list goes on: fresh basil, cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, cumbers and more all filling five large planter boxes that fill the Bass family’s front yard.

Julie Bass says, “We thought we’re minding our own business, doing something not ostentatious and certainly not obnoxious or nothing that is a blight on the neighborhood, so we didn’t think people would care very much.”

But some cared very much and called the city. The city then sent out code enforcement.

Asked for a comment Oak Park City Planner Kevin Rulkowski said:

“If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster’s dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what’s common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers,” he said.

Apparently a lot of people decided to check out Mr. Rulkowski, because ‘suitable’ was the number one search at the Merriam-Webster site today. Sorry, Kevin, but ‘common’ is nowhere to be found in the definition.

Well, just to check I went to Thesaurus.com and searched for synonyms of ‘common’, looking for ‘suitable’:

accepted, banal, bourgeois, casual, characteristic, colloquial, comformable, commonplace, conventional, current, customary, daily, everyday, familiar, frequent, general, habitual, hackneyed, homely, humdrum, informal, mediocre, monotonous, natural, obscure, passable, plain, prevailing, prevalent, probable, prosaic, regular, routine, run-of-the-mill, simple, stale, standard, stereotyped, stock, trite, trivial, typical, undistinguished, universal, unvaried, usual, wearisome, workaday, worn-out

There are other synonyms of ‘common’ that include ‘communistic’ and ‘vulgar’, but this is a family friendly blog [for a given definition of ‘family’].

If you are raising livestock, grass might a suitable use of land, but for most residential purposes, grass is a wasteful, expensive, usually invasive, ground cover. The chemicals in fertilizers and pesticides used to grow grass for lawns end up in storm water run-off and pollute rivers and streams. Lawnmowers produce air and noise pollution for no real purpose. Irrigating lawns is monumental waste of fresh drinking water Residential lawns are a blight, and should be avoided wherever possible. Grass is not ‘suitable’, and people and the planet would be better served if it were a good deal less ‘common’.