Normal Green: Neighbors bring communities together with backyard farms

In the early 90s my parents bought a house right on the Rogue River in beautiful Southern Oregon. I was away at college at the time and my first visit was in late summer. I took off from smoggy, crowded Los Angeles, and a couple of hours later was plopped into a lush, quiet, and impossibly green valley. The thing I remember most about that first visit was driving home and seeing hand-painted cardboard signs at the end of driveways advertising whatever the bumper crop of that particular backyard garden was: berries by the gallon, apples, apricots, lettuces, squash, tomatoes and cucumbers. Or, perhaps local salmon or eggs.

We'd turn down a driveway — sometimes gravel, sometimes paved — and the owner of the house would come out to greet us. We'd chat about what was available, and after exchanging a few dollar bills, leave with fresh home-grown produce. And sometimes, pie. Having been raised mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, this concept was new to me. Turn down a stranger's driveway here and you might find the owner of the home reaching for phone to dial 9-1-1. Or, more likely, you'd find no one at home since people work hard to be able to afford to live here. But a recent article in City Farmer about a Vancouver BC man who sells produce at his curb immediately took me back to those summers in Oregon wondering what was at the end of my neighbor's driveway. View video here.

If you think about it, sharing the bounty of a backyard garden is the original Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model: urban or suburban farmers building community by providing for their neighbors, neighbors getting to know one another because of it. How many times have you taken a bumpercrop of tomatoes or zucchini to a friend, or been given tomatoes or zucchini by friends who had so much they didn't know what to do with it? Imagine if those same people banded together with other people on their block to create an urban CSAs. I am dreaming about driving through my neighborhood seeing not lemonade stands on every corner (although I do love those), but neighborhood produce stands. I have three kinds of tomatoes to offer and possibly some cucumbers and strawberries if they decide to cooperate. And I bake a mean pie.