Comments on: Front yard gardener wins over officials with petition

By: campidg

campidg — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 04:59:00 +0000

Has any one heard of the doco ‘Lawn and Order’? It came out either in the late eighties or early nineties, was made in Canada and was all about this issue. Would love it if someone could point me towards a download.

By: Jonathan Yao

Jonathan Yao — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 20:52:00 +0000

Yes, but that was a path that the homeowners made for the garden. In the Google street view that someone posted later in the comments, http://goo.gl/maps/OkNRp, it shows the house before the garden was made. There is no sidewalk in the picture.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 05:21:00 +0000

Good material for a class action suit.

By: Theranthrope

Theranthrope — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:39:00 +0000

…then there’s hockey fans.

By: Theranthrope

Theranthrope — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:37:00 +0000

Drink water? Like from the toilet? Nah, I’ll stick with drinking Brawndo… It’s got electrolytes.

By: Theranthrope

Theranthrope — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:35:00 +0000

Well, there’s that other guy who got kicked off a plane for wearing a t-shirt, that should even it out.

By: Theranthrope

Theranthrope — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:33:00 +0000

Well, I live in Las Vegas, and for a lot of the (powertripping) HOAs here, desert landscaping is a big: “No-no” that will get you fined, liened, or possibly kicked out of your house. Same thing for sensible things like solar panels (we get 300 days of sun a year, and solar provides power when it’s MOST needed) or other water-saving or power-generating amenities, because it’s a friggen DESERT, but uniformity is more important… or something…

Madness!

By: Theranthrope

Theranthrope — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:26:00 +0000

Who is Canada at war with, again? It’s the hockey, I tell you! Makes the Canuckistanis bloodthirsty (but polite) warmongers.

By: Theranthrope

Theranthrope — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 03:21:00 +0000

Urban gardening; the latest front on the war on terror!

By: Olivier Bonenfant

Olivier Bonenfant — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:32:00 +0000

The only back story is : the neighbors were picking vegetables and fruits from their garden. It was a garden open to everyone. No need to think about worst case scenarios where it’s a gated garden with someone with a shotgun protecting it. It’s working differently around here.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 21:00:00 +0000

The street on which I grew up has no sidewalks. There’s a car maybe every ten minutes. Why waste money on sidewalks?

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:28:00 +0000

Street easements usually cover a large chunk of people’s front yards. Municipalities don’t generally object to planting trees, which are hell to remove. A few 10x2s aren’t nearly as difficult to deal with as a tree, in the unlikely event that the city decides to widen the street.

By: meteor64

meteor64 — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 18:59:00 +0000

I found a picture that shows there is no sidewalk:

http://quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/08/14/drummondville-potager-permis_n_1775005.html

Site is in French but picture is multilingual.

By: Jer_00

Jer_00 — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 17:55:00 +0000

Xenoscaping might also be landscaping projects that you can never finish but only ever end up halfway to where you wanted to get each time you go to work on them.

Honestly, I have a lot of Xenoprojects lying around come to think of it.

By: morgane

morgane — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 17:10:00 +0000

Je connais déjà celle de La Banquise qui est FABULEUSE donc j’ai mon parti pris pour celle-là! Mais j’aime aussi celle de chez Ben, On Se Bourre La Bedaine de Granby donc la lutte pour la meilleure va être serrée!

By: Navin_Johnson

Navin_Johnson — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:55:00 +0000

Dropping in on streetview most of the older areas (judging by the houses) have sidewalks. This is obviously a newer development which sadly means it’s more car friendly than pedestrian friendly. My grandfather lives in a similar development, but a bit older, where you have to walk in the street to go anywhere, it’s stupid.

By: Navin_Johnson

Navin_Johnson — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:51:00 +0000

Seems obvious. This is a newer suburban style development, which likely means more conservative/busy body neighbors. Many of the houses are somewhat plain and modest, but there’s also a lot of them that are verging on McMansion style. One thing is clear, they all have immaculate green lawns.

By: ludauvick Geoffroy

ludauvick Geoffroy — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:57:00 +0000

J’aurais jamais penser un jour que je lirais un article de Boing Boing à propos de Drummondville. Je suis natif de Drummondville et je ne peux malheureusement pas aller au festival de la poutine. Have fun! Tu me diras quelle poutine était la meilleur!

By: james marshall

james marshall — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:24:00 +0000

i see several stone, gravel, and black top walk and drive ways in the picture, none of them keeping you from accessing anything. also, keep your dog from shitting in my garden please (wtf kinda asshole anyway…). and kids should be prepared to pay for whatever damgage they cause (even if its cause they lost their own ball… or broke a window, or messed up your garden patch – teaching them responsibility and all.

By: dragonfrog

dragonfrog — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:07:00 +0000

Canadian cities generally have property lines well back from the curb – between the property line and the curb or sidewalk (if any) is land owned by the city, but that the adjoining property owner has to maintain (clean, mow the grass, shovel the snow), and isn’t allowed to block off – a sidewalk doesn’t need to be paved, for it to have to remain accessible.

If you walk a few blocks down to the river, the river-front road has no paved walks on either side of the road, and lots of the richy-rich folks there have landscaped right down to the curb with trees or plants that shunt pedestrians to the other side of the street. I’m sure it’s entirely against the city’s bylaws, but bylaws are for other people.

By: dragonfrog

dragonfrog — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Exactly – try recovering a lost ball from an alien-lizard-banana filled yard. Fuggedaboutit.

By: dragonfrog

dragonfrog — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:58:00 +0000

They are probably gardening on city property though – at least here in Edmonton, there is a sizable chunk of city land between the street and (as on our side of the street) the sidewalk or (as on the other side of the street) the curb. The property owner is responsible for basic maintenance and mowing, and for shovelling the sidewalk in winter.

We’ve got flowerbeds outside of our fence, on the city land, and lots of people have hedges and such outside their property lines – you’ve just got to accept that the city can come and dig that land up if they need to for infrastructure maintenance. I’m not honestly sure what limits there are to what you can and can’t grow on that land. I wouldn’t be surprised if things that would impede getting a shovel in the ground would be off limits – like a raised garden bed.

By: CH

CH — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:17:00 +0000

Well… from my view point, coming from a totally different country, that this ever was an issue looks to me as batshit crazy, sorry.

By: CH

CH — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:13:00 +0000

Just how far have you wandered from nature if a garden is an eyesore? Rows of cars in front of the house is apparently ok, but a garden isn’t? How about an apple tree, is that ok? Flowers? Bushes? Or just cars?

By: Sasha@librtee

Sasha@librtee — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 09:29:00 +0000

This is the difference between Canada/Australia and the USA. They are all pretty much fucked and overrun by petty tyrants, but there is at least a SLIVER of sanity in the commonwealth countries. A positive outcome like this is much less likely in batshit crazy Amerika.

By: CH

CH — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 09:14:00 +0000

I still don’t get it why one would need to use somebody else’s yard for that? If there is no pavement, you walk on the roadside, why would you walk in somebody’s yard? (Is this perhaps a cultural difference, I seriously don’t understand?) If you have a dog, it can very well shit on the road… I don’t care, not my problem… I don’t want dogs shitting on my yard. Or if the ball falls on my yard, the kids can come and ask if they can go pick it up (sure, go right ahead, mind the plants!)… why would it need to define what I do or don’t do with my yard?

By: Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 04:37:00 +0000

We have no front yard garden, but we did pick 7 varieties of fruit from the front yard this year.

By: morgane

morgane — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 04:16:00 +0000

It’s the National poutine Festival in Drumondville this week-end

http://festivaldelapoutine.com/

just saying… (i might go saturday! Poutine…mmmmmmmmmm, so good)

By: artaxerxes

artaxerxes — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 03:19:00 +0000

Sounds like your garden is about the size of my family’s and then, the one I planted with my partner: just a bit larger than the garden shown above.

Just thinking about canning and the great stuff we ate all year was making me wish for a larger footprint at my current house.

I suppose I had it easier than most because my adopted family was right off the farm, but I remember hard work at points, maintenance which was relaxing and a lot of time off from our veggies and fruits and flowers. I also remember picking the best-tasting food all summer and early fall from the garden and whipping up a dinner made primarily of vegetables picked a half hour before. Superb.

And canning is just straight-up fun. Especially when you think you’ve perfected your kosher dill pickle recipe. And eat them suckers 8 months later.

I love this post. It’s got me psyched up for my fall planting.

By: ocker3

ocker3 — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 03:11:00 +0000

Look at the photo in the original article, there’s a very straight paved path going right through the garden