A few streets away from me lives a retired man who has turned his front yard into a productive cornucopia. He cycles through hundreds of kilos of mostly lettuce and chives from the patch in front of his urban miner’s cottage that most inner city urbanites simply pave over or park a car upon. He grows it at roughly twice the speed that I can. It fills me with a mix of pride that my suburb is full of this behaviour and envy that I don’t do it as well myself.

I have absolutely no idea what motivates of this particular man to plant out his front yard. Is it poverty and a lack of choice? The feeling of empowerment that you get from putting your own food on the table? A middle finger to consumer capitalism's substandard greens? A concern for the environment and building your own sustainable food source? An excess of leisure time? A strange lettuce fetish?

I could, of course, ask him the next time that I see him but alone, the act of growing your own food does not come with a specific ethic or philosophy attached to it. I can't assume anything about the man's basis for growing things except for his love for leafy greens. Politics is what sits in my reptilian hind-brain; sadly it has probably replaced a core motor function that I’ll find out about in later life. Both propagation and propaganda are close to my heart and it is difficult for me not to ask what are the political implications of growing a home garden even if the actors involved don't believe that there is one.

Could it be feminist?

The release of the book Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture spawned two interesting reviews, one in Canada’s Globe and Mail, the other in the New York Times Magazine. Both look at the trend of leaving the paid workforce to develop advanced domestic and gardening skills, and broadly answer the feminist question. The New York Times lead with an unfortunate neologism - "femivore" - where the Globe and Mail were more guarded in their use of the English language. The bloggers at Feminist Philosophers juxtapose the two:

One fascinating feature of the juxtaposition is that the NY Times article really plays up the feminism, explicitly mentioning it several times– while at the same time framing the movement as all about a new, even more labour-intensive sort of housewifery (albeit an environmentally superior one). The Globe and Mail article, which doesn’t mention feminism, actually describes something that sounds much more feminist– since it’s not assuming that it’s all “chicks with chicks”.

Both sound suspiciously like downshifting - making a "voluntary, longterm, lifestyle change that involves accepting significantly less income and consuming less"- a term popularised in Australia by a study by the Australia Institute back in 2003 not to mention the popular Sigrid Thornton television series but regardless of the term used, a specific sort of domesticity that involves growing your own food has become a legitimate choice rather than a chore that is imposed.

While you can't discern a philosophical basis for any garden from the outside, they can be used to justify any philosophy.

Local blogger Tammi Jonas also provides coverage.