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.

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.