Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, 2nd Revised Edition
A Project by Fritz Haeg
Preface by Fritz Haeg. Text by Will Allen, Diana Balmori, Rosalind Creasy, Fritz Haeg, Michael Pollan, Eric W. Sanderson, Lesley Stern, et al.
Since the first edition of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn was published in 2008, interest in edible gardening has exploded across the United States and abroad. Even First Lady Michelle Obama is doing it! This greatly expanded second edition of the book documents the eight Edible Estates regional prototype gardens that author Fritz Haeg has planted in California, Kansas, Texas, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and England, and includes personal accounts from the homeowner-gardeners about the pleasures and challenges of publicly growing food where they live. Ten “Reports from Coast to Coast” tell the stories of others who have planted their own edible front yards in towns and cities across the country. In addition to essays by renowned landscape architect and scholar Diana Balmori, edible-landscaping pioneer Rosalind Creasy, bestselling author and sustainable-food advocate Michael Pollan and artist and writer Lesley Stern, this edition features updated text by Haeg (including his observations on the Obama White House vegetable garden); a contribution from Mannahatta author Eric W. Sanderson; and Growing Power founder, MacArthur Fellow and urban farmer Will Allen's never-before-published Declaration of the Good Food Revolution. This is not a comprehensive how-to book, nor a showcase of impossibly perfect gardens. The stories presented here are intended to reveal something about how we are living today and to inspire readers to plant their own versions of an Edible Estate. If we see that our neighbor's typical grassy lawn instead can be a beautiful food garden, perhaps we will begin to look at the city around us with new eyes. Our private land can be a public model for the world in which we would like to live.
"What is food security? And what is a local food system? They are interlocked. Food security is knowing that you have a reliable, year-round source of real nutrition. A local food system is a mechanism that ensures that security. Almost no one, very few farmers even, attempts to grow all the varieties of food he wants and needs, nor do many have the luxury of living in either a climate or a neighborhood that would allow it. It is well to believe that you are self-sufficient enough to go it alone, but it is better to know that you can make it together. Anyone can suffer a catastrophic loss, and for the single gardener, that can be as large a catastrophe as a flood or hailstorm or as small as a single hungry woodchuck. It is not enough, and you have not arrived at self-sufficiency, if a poor or damaged crop drives you back to the supermarket shelves, even though you may be lucky enough to afford to be there. If you are truly committed to Good Food and Good Food only, you need to be part of something larger than yourself--you need to be part of a local food system. Such a system comes into being when enough producers, offering enough quality, quantity and variety of foodstuffs to meet year-round consumer needs, form a co-op, a network, or a coalition capable of marketing and distributing their products as a significant proportion of the local food chain."
On April 8th WNYC | The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space and Metropolis Books presented a rousing and inspiring panel moderated by the inimitable Leonard Lopate with Fritz Haeg (artist, designer and radical gardener), Will Allen (MacArthur Fellow, founder of Growing Power and friend of Michelle Obama), Scott M. Stringer (Manhattan's Borough President and the force behind FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System), and Annie Novak (a real life urban farmer at Eagle Street Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint Brooklyn and founder of Growing Chefs). continue to blog
How do we make ourselves at home in the city? What does it mean to grow and harvest our own food and resourcefully and artfully make ourselves at home? Edible Estates author Fritz Haeg, artist-in-residence at the Walker Art Center, explores these questions with his current exhibition/intervention, on view in Minneapolis through November 24. continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 8.5 x 8.5 in. / 176 pgs / 86 color / 85 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $24.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $27.5 ISBN: 9781935202127 PUBLISHER: Metropolis Books AVAILABLE: 3/31/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA ME
Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, 2nd Revised Edition A Project by Fritz Haeg
Published by Metropolis Books. Preface by Fritz Haeg. Text by Will Allen, Diana Balmori, Rosalind Creasy, Fritz Haeg, Michael Pollan, Eric W. Sanderson, Lesley Stern, et al.
Since the first edition of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn was published in 2008, interest in edible gardening has exploded across the United States and abroad. Even First Lady Michelle Obama is doing it! This greatly expanded second edition of the book documents the eight Edible Estates regional prototype gardens that author Fritz Haeg has planted in California, Kansas, Texas, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and England, and includes personal accounts from the homeowner-gardeners about the pleasures and challenges of publicly growing food where they live. Ten “Reports from Coast to Coast” tell the stories of others who have planted their own edible front yards in towns and cities across the country. In addition to essays by renowned landscape architect and scholar Diana Balmori, edible-landscaping pioneer Rosalind Creasy, bestselling author and sustainable-food advocate Michael Pollan and artist and writer Lesley Stern, this edition features updated text by Haeg (including his observations on the Obama White House vegetable garden); a contribution from Mannahatta author Eric W. Sanderson; and Growing Power founder, MacArthur Fellow and urban farmer Will Allen's never-before-published Declaration of the Good Food Revolution. This is not a comprehensive how-to book, nor a showcase of impossibly perfect gardens. The stories presented here are intended to reveal something about how we are living today and to inspire readers to plant their own versions of an Edible Estate. If we see that our neighbor's typical grassy lawn instead can be a beautiful food garden, perhaps we will begin to look at the city around us with new eyes. Our private land can be a public model for the world in which we would like to live.
