Welcome to Front Yardening, where I chronicle my attempts to grow food in my extremely urban front yard without upsetting the neighbors. Usually this involves providing said neighbors with bushels of fresh, vine-ripened, heirloom tomatoes, but sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes, the neighbors decide to put their house up for sale. Seriously.

I’m trying not to take it personally.

Growing your own food is healthy and delicious, and it turns out that farming in your front yard can be something of a social experiment. I’ve made a lot of new friends (there are really only a few people who cross to the other side of the street when they see me out in the garden). Best case scenario: I harvest lots of fresh, organic produce. Worst case scenario: I get cited and arrested!

I used to write the popular weekly garden column How Does Your Garden Grow for ReadyMade online (an archive of that column can be found here). When ReadyMade went bust in June 2011, I decided to keep on keepin’ on, and Front Yardening was born.