Lawns gardens are a great idea, and I completely agree with the writer that if one is going to spend time and energy on yardwork, why not ask that such time and energy yield something? As some of the comments on the post point out, local regulations often forbid it.

I understand the rationale for green lawns, which are basically a form of fire insurance (HT: my father-in-law, who inspects hospitals for a living and knows everything there is to know about fire codes). However, and in my mind this is unfortunate, what we think of as a "yard" has been enshrined in law and potentially useful experiments in urban living have been effectively made illegal. I'd much rather tend a tomato patch in front of the house than mow grass (or, more specifically, pay someone else to do it). I'm pretty sure the City of Memphis wouldn't let me. I'll have to look into it.

I can think of a couple of externality rationales for laws against front-yard gardens, but I don't think they're tenable when subjected to scrutiny. One could argue that there are aesthetic externalities, but first I'm not sure they justify the regulatory costs and second it isn't clear that the externality is positive or negative. Some of our neighbors do truly amazing things with their yards, and we reap some of the aesthetic benefits (they don't grow vegetables, though).

It seems like this can also be fixed through the housing market. In efficient housing markets the expected value of future positive and negative externalities emanating from the fact that we don't have onerous restrictions on what you can and can't do with your yard in our neighborhood will be capitalized into home values. One man's trash will be another man's treasure: people who value freedom and experimentation will live in neighborhoods that don't have such restrictions. People who value uniformity and continuity can select into private neighborhoods with restrictions on what you can and can't plant.

A more plausible externality argument is that edible flora will attract undesirable fauna. Again, though, the steps people would take to ensure that their veggies don't get eaten would also reduce the probability that neighbors' veggies would get eaten and at least partially mitigate the externality. Even if contracting institutions fail, I'm still not convinced that the size of the externality justifies government intervention, especially when one considers the long-run effect on incentives to use force rather than persuasion to accomplish what you want.

And while we're talking about externalities, if the "food miles" argument for locavorism has any merit--and I'm not convinced it does, but don't take my word for it--then we're trading off small negative externalities associated with at-home food production in order to reduce negative externalities associated with the international structure of food production ("global calorie infrastructure," perhaps?).

There is also a more fundamnetal question about liberty at stake here. If Sarah Palin can shoot wolves from a helicopter, shouldn't I be allowed to grow tomatoes in my front yard?