From Our Own Yards

Food gardens are back in vogue.

Eating fresh, local and healthy food has never been bigger -- and it doesn't get any more local than your own yard. I visited several gardeners who have brought vegetable gardening right into the front yard.

Temple and Robert Halsey have an extensive food garden in the side yard. It is visible from the street. They grow okra, lettuce, eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers, Swiss chard cantaloupe, potatoes and much more.

The beds are filled with compost and city leaf mould. The paths are gravel. This makes the garden comfortable,

easy to work and walk, and it minimizes maintenance. Temple said the formation of the garden was organic, evolving since 1978.

"Our goal is to have something growing year round," Temple said. "We had broccoli into November last year, and we start with spinach in January. We had our first tomato … on June 4."

"I love looking out the kitchen window at the garden. It helps me remember what I need to do," Temple said.

Bryan Gates' garden in Washington Park became too shady. He built two raised beds of stacked stone and filled them full of soil mix and city-leaf compost. He grows tomatoes, okra, squash and herbs in one bed and flowers such as salvias and black-eyed Susans in the other.

Like the Halsey's garden, Gates' has become a conversation piece for pedestrians. Gates gathers water from the roof in rain barrels, and he has rigged up a system for collecting condensation from the air conditioner.

"It's nice to be able to step out the front door and get stuff or to tell neighbors to help themselves when I'm away." Gates doesn't have any use for grass. "I think grass is a waste."

Harold Claytor Jr. gardens off of West Clemmonsville Road. It's in a sunken, front-yard plot with a block wall protecting it. Tomatoes and cucumbers are beside herbs and bell peppers.

Claytor was beginning the transition from summer crops to fall when I visited. It's the second year that his plot had been producing. "I learned gardening from my grandfather," Claytor said. "He was a lazy gardener."

Like Gates, Claytor lets his plants mix and ramble with each other in a tangled, yet productive plot that supplies his family with most of what they need for fresh produce. He mixes in herbs to keep the bugs out, and he switched to raised beds because he thinks it helps with the weeds.

In West End, Helen and Derek Parsonage have been cultivating their English-style cottage garden for about 10 years. Vegetables are integrated among a variety of ornamentals. Helen said that a requirement of her edible plants is that "they have to be plants that look nice," pointing out that many edible plants are just as attractive as ornamentals.

In small, island beds, tomatoes and peppers go up spiral stakes, with kale and collards planted beneath to take their place as the season cools.

"I thought things would need a lot more space than they do," Helen said. Roses are mixed with tomatoes and herbs. Even the strip between the sidewalk and the road supports rosemary and oregano.

"Looks wonderful," said a neighbor jogging by as we talked in the street. It's such interactions that drive the garden. "The neighbors really enjoy it, and that's why I like to do it," Helen said. She spoke about the children next door nibbling the grape tomatoes last year and how she encouraged neighbors to pick from the garden -- within reason.

The vegetables in Kitty Felts' garden in Sherwood Forest are practically invisible.

"We used to have a large maple tree that blocked the sun. But when that came out, I decided I would grow vegetables. It is my only area of sun."

Felts has managed to tuck them so stealthily among reseeded cockscombs and impatiens that you have to really look to find them. But they are there, tomatoes in cages with Tardiva hydrangeas, cucumbers sprawling along as a groundcover and yellow, green and red peppers. Three crops of beans came out of the garden, which extends to the back. The front garden is dominated by a tall magnolia.

"Here's a trick," Felts said. She pulled sprigs of magnolia that she had cut and tucked into the tomato cages to conceal the ripening fruit from birds. Behind them were perfect tomatoes. "They just take one peck and they're ruined," she said.

Despite the imperceptible nature of her produce, she manages to have enough to make pickles and distribute excess cucumbers up and down the street. In the spring, the entire bed is a mix of colorful daffodils, without a hint of vegetables.

Whether planted beds are free flowing and wild, neatly manicured and formal or compactly consolidated with the ornamental landscape, each of these gardens chips away at an antiquated concept of what a front yard should be. And though the wild and rambunctious growth of tomato vines and cucumbers may seem like anarchy, there is an underlying logic to using time in the garden to produce food and save money.

If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159 or send an e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.