At least once a week, someone asks me, "Aren't you afraid people will steal from your garden?" After all, there's no fence, we get a lot of foot traffic, and the raised beds run right up to the sidewalk.
This is one of the risks of putting your edibles gardens in the front yard. It's happened to so many people: you come home one day to find that someone's taken the liberty of harvesting all your corn. You watch your spindly little watermelon plant produce a single fruit, wait and wait and wait for it to ripen, and then it disappears one night.
I'm not talking here about someone helping themselves to a sprig of rosemary, or pulling a plum from a tree that's full of fruit. I've even thought about planting extra culinary herbs along the sidewalk, with signs inviting people to pick a few leaves and suggestions for using them in cooking. That's fine. Taking the whole plant is not.
And yes, I am afraid that people will steal things. That I'll wake up one morning and someone will have picked all the raspberries. And that even though I can easily go and buy more from the farmer's market, a big part of the fun of front yard gardening will be gone.
So why not put up a fence? Because a few times every week, strangers stop to tell me how much they enjoy watching the garden grow. People slow down and smile as they pass the garden. If I'm in the yard, they say hi; if they see me at the window, we'll smile and wave. I watch commuters pause on their daily rush to or from the nearby BART station to check out the new sprouts, or lean in to see whether the pea tendrils have managed to find the trellis I made from downed branches. (The first few reached it yesterday.)
I'm afraid that a fence would change this dynamic. Is there a way to discourage physical entry into the yard while still inviting people to pause, say hi, and check out what's growing today?
