LF: After 6-Year Fight, Florida Couple Wins Right to Grow Veggies at Home

Vegetables are ugly. Or at least that's the view of the officials in Miami Shores, Florida, who implemented a ban on front-yard vegetable gardens at residential properties in 2013. The ordinance forced Hermine Ricketts and her husband, Laurence Carroll, to uproot the garden they'd maintained for nearly two decades.

Now they can start planting again: The Florida legislature has passed a bill shielding vegetable gardens from local prohibitions. "After nearly six years of fighting…I will once again be able to legally plant vegetables in my front yard," Ricketts said in a statement. "I'm grateful to the Legislature and the governor for standing up to protect my freedom to grow healthy food on my own property."

The Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit on Ricketts' behalf in 2013. Florida's Third District Court of Appeals upheld the ban, and the state's Supreme Court declined to hear the case. So Ricketts and the institute lobbied the legislature, and it passed a law effectively invalidating the local ordinance. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it last week.

How were city commissioners able to pass the rule in the first place, much less get it past an appeals court? It was billed as a zoning regulation, which cities have near-unlimited power in implementing. The Florida League of Cities opposed Ricketts' efforts until the end, arguing that code enforcement is an essential tool for maintaining a town's aesthetic. They also didn't like the idea of a state government preempting measures adopted at the local level.

Ricketts now uses a wheelchair and has suffered from a litany of health issues in recent years, which she blames on stress induced by the legal battle. She's hoping that a little gardening might be the medicine she needs.

"You're down on the earth, touching the soil, kneeling on the ground….It's a healing process," she told the Miami Herald. "I'm hoping to get back in the garden and spend time outside doing things I love. The healing things in the sunshine."

No. She's hoping that a little front-yard gardening might be the medicine she needs. I guess having a garden in the backyard -- where normal people have one -- just won't hack it.

An orderly, well-kept garden is not an eyesore. They can be as attractive to many of us as just-another-freaking-water-wasting-fertilizer-sucking-patch-of-bluegrass.

The city is still free to use zoning laws to ensure that the garden is maintained and not some overgrown mess.

A government powerful enough to dictate your use of your front yard is also powerful to put you in jail or shoot you if you don't comply. Over growing vegetables, for instance.

I also think that the craze for locally grown produce lends some leeway to the gardening couple. They just want to grow some food to put on their table. It makes them more self-sufficient. It is the ultimate in local produce so it is much more environmentally friendly than mandating this couple grow a lawn, throwing potable water and lots of fertilizer on it and generating smog from some crappy lawnmower to keep it cut and then they burn some gas to drive to a store to buy all their produce, much of which is trucked in hundreds or thousands of miles. Because their nosy neighbors are offended by the sight of food production.

We have a farmer's market here in the summer. It isn't widely known but there are a few retired elderly guys who grow tomatoes and melon to sell there. They even rent their neighbor's backyards or rent entire vacant house lots to grow vegetables on. The community gets local produce, less water wasted on a useless lawn (or patch of weeds), less mowing and fertilizing on these lower-value or unused properties. The gardens are well-kept and they tear out the tomato or melon vines as soon as they stop producing. Then they keep the gardening area clear of weeds, letting the garden lie fallow until next year. In some cases, they have a low-rent trailer or tiny house and the landlord rents out the house and front yard but they still rent out the back yard to a produce gardener.

We certainly don't lack busybodies in this town but no one complains a bit about these rather large gardens, located in a low-rent area of town.

No one complains about it at all, at least not publicly. We still have some empty lots from very old houses getting torn down that I wish they would grow gardens on. People who own a house lot with no house on it don't keep them maintained or keep a lawn going.

What's to stop the city-dwellers from deciding they're offended by the sight of cattle ranches or feedlots or cornfields and passing laws to require those businesses to move out of view from interstates and highways? You know, because some busybodies like you have decided they don't want to look at food being produced.

Sure. Just do it in the back yard. You're conflating their right to have a garden with their right to have it in the front yard. Typical bleeding heart liberal tactic -- "They onnnnnly want to grow foooood …".

The city/county/neighbors don't want vegetable gardens in the front of houses. They looks like crap and lower home values. I'm guessing they also don't allow swing sets, swimming pools, and clothes lines in front yards for the same reason.

A steel mill next to a residential neighborhood next to a pig farm. A Tooconservative Libertarian utopia.

I don't mind seeing any of those in front yards. And it isn't my property anyway.

What else do you want to give nosy neighbors and petty tyrants on some local HOA or city council the power to do? Dictate what color your house can be? The color of your car? What kind of trees and shrub you can plant? Mandate a specific bluegrass variety or outlaw buffalo grass (which isn't as pretty as bluegrass but saves a lot on water and fertilizer)?

But they have to look at it. And it affects their property values. Don't they have rights, also?

People have the right to get together and decide how they want to live. You want to dictate how they will live. Thank God we don't live in your Libertarian utopia.

It doesn't matter if they don't like they way it looks. It doesn't matter if it affects their property value.

Where in the constitution does it give someone rights if someone does something that affects their property value? It doesn't.

"Where in the constitution does it give someone rights if someone does something that affects their property value? It doesn't."

We're talking about a local ordinance, not the U.S. Constitution. The people decided how they will live. They have rights, too.

Apparently you could place statues, fountains, gnomes, pink flamingos or Santa in a Speedo in front yards there, park a boat or jet ski in your driveway - just no gardens, until now.

Hey paulsen - aren't you the condescending prick who always says "if you don't like the law, change it?"

Correct. But in this case, the jackboots at the Florida State legislature changed a local ordinance passed by the citizens.

Aren't you the asshole who hates big government (except, of course, when big government does your bidding)?

You're just some geezer Democrat with a penchant for police cruelty and allowing communities to abuse the property rights of their residents. You have a real fascist streak in your personality.

The owner of the propertys rights trumps you little snowflakes non right to tell someone else what to do on their property.

Well, maybe we should look at the property. I do have a weakness for the ol' Before And After.

Before, with the garden, right after the ordinance was passed against this couple:

Bullies like misterwhite are grieving today that an elderly couple in poor health stood up to their jackbooted neighbors and the petty tyrants on the village board.

In this case, the State of Florida is abusing the rights of local community residents. But that's OK with you because you agree with the State.

I say the local residents have the right to decide how they will live. The ordinance was in place before Contrary Mary decided to deface the neighborhood with her silver bells and cockle shells.

If the community decides to change their mind and eliminate that ordinance, that fine by me.

So if the state says no marijuanna and the local community says yes we want legal marijuanny. You are with the local community on legalizing marijuanna?

Yeah, by using the power of the State of Florida. Is that how you want to live -- with State bureaucrats hundreds of miles away deciding how you will live and what you have to put up with?

The ordinance was put into place some 17 years after the couple first started planting their garden.

Well, I thought it went without saying that the local ordinance would have to be legal.

Can I move in next to you and raise hogs? They're a little smelly. And noisy sometimes. And they love mud.

Florida's legislature chose to protect the property rights of property owners. You object because you believe that the rights of adjacent property owners are superior to those of the property owners (who do pay the taxes on the property).

America has a history of forbidding neighbors from certain interference with property rights. You may recall the segregated neighborhoods, mostly on the east coast, where property owners had entered into a covenant and placed restrictions on the sale of property due to clauses that no property owner would sell to a non-white buyer and the owner would include the same restrictive clauses in the sales contract in any subsequent sale of the property. The courts refused to enforce those racial housing covenants and they became just a footnote in property law history.

You make it sound like being bullied by a couple of nosy-Parker neighbors and their creepy corrupt buddies on the village council is so much better than being bullied by some faceless bureaucrat.

How about this: No bullying. Elderly people are allowed to garden in peace on their own property. This is what the Florida legislature decided was going to happen.

I think you'd really rather send the cops in, guns blazing, to take out these two old people for raising a very attractive garden. You'd like that.

Well the local ordinance prohibiting gardens is illegal. It conflicts with state law. You are not consistent.

I have a cousin who lives in a very large old farmhouse in a tony section of town - over 250K population - where he owns almost a half-block of land. He keeps a flock of chickens, has a chicken coop even. He knows some others who have chickens too.

You want chickens for eggs or for slaughter? I assume for the eggs, I haven't heard of anyone raising pullets inside a town for meat.

I don't really like eggs. Unless they are in a cake or something. Or maybe hard boiled.

The local ordinance was legal until the jackbooted bureaucrats at the State of Florida passed a new law stating that "a county, municipality, or other political subdivision of this state may not regulate vegetable gardens on residential properties".

Now I'm trying to picture someone raising chickens for meat in town and doing the usual slaughter in the backyard. Using the traditional beheading method. Typically, in our area, you'd grab the chicken by the legs, put its head under a steel rod, stand on the rod, and pull on the legs to rip its head off. And of course the body shakes a lot so the body will flap around a lot, spewing blood everywhere so you release it and it flops around, leaving blood everywhere. After it stops twitching, you can start defeathering it.

I'm sure misterwhite just fainted at the thought of his neighbors beheading chickens in a bloody backyard spectacle.

I think a lot of people might draw the line at meat production in town where just keeping hens for laying is generally much more acceptable.

I just said I would like to have some chickens. I'm not going to get any chickens any time soon so don't worry.

I live on a farm. Beheaded chickens with an ax. But when all is said and done, not worth the effort.

But the best way is with a killing cone. This way they don't flop around and break a leg or wing.