With summer now upon us, gardening season is in
full swing. And that can only mean it’s time for local government
officials around the country to try to outdo one another when it
comes to preventing everyday people from growing fruit and
vegetables in their own yards.

If the proposition that squads of busybody, anti-gardening
bureaucrats are waiting in your thicket, ready to pounce on the
pecks of peppers you might have tended in your yard sounds like
hyperbole, then you clearly have not been paying attention to the
news. In years.

Last summer an Oak Park, Michigan, woman faced more than three
months in jail for keeping a well-manicured edible garden in her
front yard. Oak Park officials charged Julie Bass with a
misdemeanor because in their opinion Ms. Bass’s tomatoes and
vegetables did not
meet the city’s definition of “suitable live plant
material.” The city eventually
dropped the charges.

Last month, Newton, Massachusetts officials brought the
hammer down on a town resident whose handsome hanging tomato
garden ran afoul of a city building ordinance prohibiting the
construction of “swing sets, swimming pools, or sheds” in a front
yard.

“It’s a straight-out violation of the ordinance,’’
said John Lojek, the city’s commissioner of inspectional
services, at the time. (If “inspectional” is a typo, then it is one
that appears to be
repeated all over officialdom in Massachusetts.)

Faced with the prospect of dismantling the structure, the
resident, Eli Katzoff, sought a path to legitimacy.

But Lojek
stood firm. “There’s no path for them.’’

Lojek was right–in practice though not in
principle. Katzoff was
forced to move his plants to the grounds of a nearby
theological seminary.

The Boston Globe characterized the move as a sign of
“[d]ivine intervention.”

The seminary’s president took a slightly more secular (and less
sanguine) view, calling this a case of “the down side of zoning.”
And, he wondered, “Who can be against tomatoes?”

Bureaucrats, that’s who.

While Oak Park and Newton are wealthy suburban enclaves, urban
and even rural home gardeners are not immune to the flowering
cruelty of local bureaucrats.

Take Denise Morrison of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Last summer Tulsa code
enforcement officers went onto her land and literally
ripped out Morrison’s edible garden.

According to reports, the ordinance at issue stated that “plants
can’t be over 12-inches tall unless they’re used for human
consumption.”

Morrison, who was unemployed at the time, consumed the wide
variety of plants she grew—including “lemon, stevia, garlic chives,
grapes, strawberries, apple mint, spearmint, peppermint, an apple
tree, walnut tree, pecan trees and much more.”