Unexpected joys of gardening in the front yard: It’s not about the veggies

In the spring of 2008, my family and I, with help from good friends, dug up our front lawn and planted a vegetable garden surrounded by a low fence entwined with grapes — or what we hoped would be grapes. 

I don’t remember exactly why we wanted a front yard garden. So we wouldn’t have to mow the dry, weedy grass that preceded it? Because buying organic vegetables was expensive? Because Michael Pollan was whispering in our ears? 

One thing we didn’t think about was that we weren’t really gardeners. We weren’t from gardening people and had little experience with soil, fertilizer or pruning. But that first year, the planter boxes, tidy islands surrounded by pea gravel, were bursting with produce. The kale was waist-high. The basil exploded into happy bunches. The tomatoes were so bright and hopeful, we didn’t care if passersby plucked a few for themselves. We got a ping of excitement every time we harvested something to eat. “We grew this,” we were always exclaiming, astonished at the garden-to-table bounty.

Years two and three brought diminishing returns. And aphids. And weeds busting through the weed cloth around the boxes. It was a mess. And it was all out there on display in the front yard. 

I was mildly self-conscious, but I was also having a nice time talking with the neighbors and people walking by on the sidewalk while I was ostensibly planting or weeding or standing around looking at the planter boxes, wondering what it is people do when they say they’re “gardening.” 

This, the community of the garden, turned out to be the real surprise of converting the space. It’s the reason the beds are still out front after 18 years of occasionally decent and sometimes really terrible harvests.

We have always known our neighbors here at 17th and Lawrence, and being out front in the garden gave us more reasons to see them and check in, opportunities when no one was hurrying to work or jostling bags of groceries inside the front door. I liked to think of the garden as a kind of third place — a gathering place that’s not work or home. (Third place is a term originated by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his book “The Great Good Place.”) Because even in a tight-knit neighborhood, neighbors rarely entered our small house. The garden provided an in-between spot to be together without the awkwardness of someone having to knock on someone else’s door.

Some sidewalk passersby give us gardening advice or troubleshoot with us; others ask what we’re growing and tell us about their own gardens. Others just talk about the mundane things people talk about when they have a little time on their hands.

My daughters — toddlers in those first few years of the garden — would wander between the house and the front yard, “helping” and getting to know the neighbors, too. The space has, I think, been an important part of their childhoods.

Sometimes rocking on the swing on the porch, where sidewalk dwellers can’t see us, we watch them pause at the low fence and hear them talking about the garden. My now-teenage daughters have found amusement in listening to what people have to say about it.

They give compliments and sometimes critiques. They speculate on what’s growing. On more than one occasion, an older person has told a child — with authority — that a certain plant is definitely corn or definitely bok choy, neither of which we’ve ever produced. 

If we’re feeling convivial, we’ll wander off the porch and talk with people. If we’re not, we can easily hide behind the shrubs that surround the porch. That’s the beauty, I think, in the third place, so perfectly situated outside of responsibility or obligation, just a quiet acknowledgement that sometimes people like to hang out with each other.