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Traffic: Where My Tennant Farmers At?

Ripping out your front lawn and putting in a vegetable garden is poised to be the next wave in landscaping. It's a bit of a do-it-yourself fad at the moment, sort of like fixed gear bicycles, but after the boom times of the fad fade away, the underlying ethos of the movement will remain. That's when we'll all come to our senses and hire landscapers, those poor sods (ha!) we'd fired when we got bit by the DIY farming bug that was all the rage.

That's right. In the near future, I predict that gardens will indeed rule the suburban landscape. Copies of the Farmer's Almanac will once again grace the coffee tables of the well-to-do middle class. Every man woman and child will have a pair of Carhart overalls hanging in their closets just at the end of their color-coordinated rows of alligator shirts and Docker shorts they use for casual Fridays at work (in the near future I also predict that even small children will have to wear laughably not-casual casual clothes on casual Fridays.) However, in spite of all these farm-like accouterments, these middle class purveyors of micro agribusiness will hire out the actual work of planting and harvesting.

But WAIT! You say. What on earth is the underlying ETHOS of this urban planting thing? Well, my friend, let me tell you. That ethos is we will all soon recognize the sheer silliness of spending our hard-earned dough on ornamental plants that consume far too many resources (water, time, money) for their respective output. We're Americans after all, and we came from good old practical and puritanical stock. We've since learned about things like opportunity cost and the value of time, of course, so even though we have what's called a "work ethic" in our ancestry, we won't have to apply any such thing to our vegetable gardens. No sir. We'll hire it out.

We'll ask ourselves how those silly people of the past (those who suffered through the 1990s) didn't figure out that they'd been paying good money to landscaping companies and getting pretty much nothing in return when, all along, they could have been getting a big ol' crop of veggies for their dough. And guess what? You take those veggies and sell "òem right back to your landscaper. Why'd we ever ditch that company-town model anyway? How'd we ever let ourselves use our land so inefficiently, huh? Isn't that what we'd kicked the Indians off of it for in the first place?

So lets get to starting up those micro agri-business fiefdoms post haste. And while we're at it, somebody look up on the internet how to make mint juleps; I feel like doin' some sippin' out on the old porch.