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.
Don’t forget about the expensive chemical treatments to maintain it so the local groundwater can become contaminated …
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.
There is a pretty great website called Falling fruit to map trees and other plants that you can pick from freely.
Hey. Thank you for sharing this.
Websites like this are the good part of the internet.
You’re welcome 😊😘🤗
I checked out my closest two locations on there. They were both dumpsters… “Best to come after midnight”.
Not what I was expecting…
Yeah they do add dumpsters from shops that throw good to eat food. I know some people that lived in Danemark for a year and basically only ate food from dumpsters…
Maybe you could add some close to you?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
You think we own shit? Lawns are the landlord’s landscaping equivalent of white paint: inoffensive but dull and useless
americans already do this i see it all the time
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.
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).
We do. Obviously not everyone can But I wager the number of Americans growing something edible on their space is decent. Usually it’s easy stuff to grow, or someone’s favorites.
Thinking about it and counting in my head I actually know dozens of people that grow tomatoes personally. They grow easily in large quantities in relatively small space and all taste better than store bought.
Citrus has been pretty plentiful my entire life too. Lemon trees especially.
Because this is illegal in most of America. You would be fined and the city would probably send a crew out to rip it all up and give you the invoice if you defied it and left it that way.
That’s a bit extreme? I think that you are correct that this may be the case in front yards depending on location, but backyards are usually fine for whatever barring some HOA BS or unusual local rules.
I’ve seen this happen before in real life so extreme or not, it’s definitely the norm in upstate New York at the very least. Had the city called on us while we were out of the country and we came back to all 6 of our small fruit trees dug up and tracks all over the front lawn from an excavator and a $2500 bill from the city.
So front yard? Yeah, not super surprised at that. I’ve heard plenty of stories about front yard cultivators running into problems with the city. I live in a more rural/urban mixed area so it’s a lot more forgiving. Plenty of people here have apples or other fruit trees in the front yard - not aggressively farming the yard, just as part of the plantings.
Ya front yard. We didn’t aggressively plant either. We had 4 or 5 fruit trees planted with beds around them
That really sucks.
Shoulda gotten a tree lawyer. Tree law is not to be fucked with.
6? What are you trying to make an orchard? That’s pretty aggressive. How big is your front yard? How long were you gone for to make the city take action? You wouldn’t get one notice, then a day later, they tear up your yard. You had to have been gone for a long time.
I have a fairly large front yard, and if I planted that many trees, yeah I’d get sited.
It doesn’t matter if you had fruit trees or not. That’s not a “you can’t plant trees in your front yard”, thats, “this many trees in a relatively small area can cause safety issues”
Wow haha you must have been the city bylaw officer with the way you are so gallantly siding with the city and telling me off for planting 6 fruit tree saplings on 1+ acres of front yard. You must have been to some very small orchards! You sound very intelligent. I am truly humbled.
Yeah I would’ve been intelligent enough to look up my city’s ordinance about planting multiple trees in my front yard. Especially if I’m going to be leaving for several months afterwards.
Like it sucks you got your trees ripped out my dude, I’m sure you can try it again. Just search it up on the interwebs of your city. 100% you’ll find it. If you want Ill search it for you. You can plant some awesome stuff in upstate.
All the best to you my man.
In, or in the yard of? We’re not talking about indoor houseplants, I assume.
If outside is what you mean, it goes back to the days of aristocracy. Having land you don’t use for food was a form of conspicuous consumption, and you had sports for the elite grow up around stretches of short grass as a result, like golf and polo. The former is still synonymous with the well-off, even.
Then you have to skip ahead to the 1950’s and 60’s in America, where the “mid-century modern” philosophy of urban planning gains prominence. The idea was to get people out of the crowded, Victorian-style slums, which we might find quaint in hindsight, but at the time were very stigmatised. This extended to a certain disdain for cities and buildings in general, even - more nature was better. So, where do you put people? In tiny little rural estates modeled on the ones popular with aristocrats, separated by zoning laws from the other sections of the city.
The vision was that people would get home from their 9-5 jobs in the commercial-only zones in their very own car, and would hang out outside enjoying their government-mandated leisure time. The urban planners of the time probably pictured a giant croquet course going up and down a residential street, and the all-white 3.5 kid families that live there sitting outside on lawn chairs, playing friendly games against each other. These “white picket fence” suburbs had lawns, then, because you couldn’t have semi-rural domestic bliss without them, according to some architects who graduated Harvard in 1920.
In practice, of course, none of that happened. Like so many other tidy ideas it failed to predict how the general public would interact with it. I’ve been around plenty of places like that. You know the names of your neighbor, but not much else about them, and the people a few doors down are suspect of being pedophiles or violent drug dealers. That fence line is sacred, each house becomes an island, and you’re frightfully dependent on driving to get anywhere you can do basic errands. And that’s not even getting into the racial issues that came out of it.
Now, in the 21st century, people assume houses have always had lawns, and messing with that formula irritates the local NIMBYs. New ideas eventually become rigid tradition, and as always it falls to the next generation to question the way things are done. Hopefully we will, but it will take a moment.
Thanks, you explained better than I would have. I was going to go on a tangent about Louis XIV showing the other aristocrats his new “lawn” concept.
Hey, thanks!
I have to point out, Versailles did have quite a bit of lawn and certainly helped, but the concept of decorative short grass predates it, and even existed in the some of the American civilisations using a totally different plant IIRC. The Wikipedia article notes several medieval examples.
Growing crops is quite a bit of cost and effort and time. I have a little garden, but it’s not like you just plant some seeds and you’re all done.
This is the answer right here.
Everyone is saying “it’s a sign of wealth” or “my HOA won’t let me”. Which yeah ok is more or less true.
Though, the real reason is it takes time, money, and a lot of effort. Which most people don’t have.
