![\"Stephanie](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/urbanfarms_0425_BH0_568884l.jpg\" "\\"Stephanie")
Stephanie Van Parys, director of the Oakhurst Community Garden, likes the Georgia Right to Grow bill. <\/p><\/div>\n
On the right: a Republican legislator who thinks people should have the right to use their land, by God, any way they want. On the left: the bandana-and-sandals set who embrace urban gardening as green and globally correct.<\/p>\n
In the middle: chickens, goats, corn, beans, tomatoes and just about anything else that thrives in Georgia\u2019s red dirt. Rep. Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta) and his newfound political cronies agree, to their mutual surprise, that those plants and animals should be able to grow wherever landowners want.<\/p>\n
But local authorities don\u2019t always see things the way locavores do, sometimes frowning on too many crops or certain livestock being raised in city neighborhoods. Thus a state lawmaker like Franklin gets involved, and suddenly finds himself in an alliance he didn\u2019t anticipate.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll take allies where I can find them,\u201d said Franklin, who admits he cannot grow a weed.<\/p>\n
One is Decatur resident Stephanie Van Parys, executive director of the Oakhurst Community Garden. Van Parys, who can grow just about anything (organically, of course) is bemused to find herself in the same patch, legislatively speaking, as a lawmaker who once defended the right of Segway riders to carry firearms. When Franklin filed the Georgia Right to Grow bill, Van Parys supported it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d really like to get into his head and know what his reasoning was,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Going green, sort of<\/p>\n
Franklin, 52, is happy to explain.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a city boy, through and through,\u201d said Franklin, a small-business consultant raised outside Birmingham. \u201cMake that a suburban boy, I guess.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet he knew about rural Alabama, and how it had sustained people through the Great Depression. Back then, people didn\u2019t have money, but they had corn and beans growing in the fields. They had chickens scratching in the backyard. They had food.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese days, we think food comes in Styrofoam trays,\u201d said Franklin.<\/p>\n
![\"Chickens](\"https:\/\/www.survival-spot.com\/survival-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/urbanfarms_0425_BH0_568905l.jpg\" "\\"Chickens")
Chickens at the Oakhurst Community Garden. <\/p><\/div>\n
In most places, homeowners can grow food to eat, except where local ordinances prohibit the practice. Franklin\u2019s bill, if it became law, would have superseded those ordinances, allowing homeowners to grow their own \u2014 chickpeas as well as chickens.<\/p>\n
He dreamed up his bill last year. Why not have a law ensuring that all Georgians could grow their own food, much as Depression-era Americans sustained themselves through those lean years with home-grown edibles? House Bill 842 began germinating in his mind.<\/p>\n
Franklin teetered into territory where the blue state-red state dispute is secondary to the state of how green a garden grows. From one coast to the other, more people than ever are embracing the backyard garden and the coop where chickens produce breakfast on a regular basis.<\/p>\n
In the metro area, Decatur is probably the friendliest municipality to backyard gardens and animals; neighborhoods in Atlanta also are home to creatures that quack and crow.<\/p>\n
Backyard gardens are getting more popular, said Gil Landry, director of the UGA Center for Urban Agriculture. Founded 10 years ago, the center advises growers on everything from ornamental shrubbery to edible produce. It does not keep figures on the number of urban growers in Georgia, but Landry says inquiries from people wanting to grow their own food have increased.<\/p>\n
Most people ask about plants, he said. And chickens? \u201cThat\u2019s a sensitive issue in some urban areas,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u2018Lightbulb\u2019 moment<\/p>\n
This coming Saturday, backyard chicken raising across metro Atlanta will be celebrated during the 2010 Urban Coop Tour, sponsored by the Oakhurst Community Garden Project, Georgia Organics and the Atlanta Backyard Poultry Meetup Group. But home-grown fowl have not been welcomed everywhere.<\/p>\n
Dunwoody officials recently banned chickens. Roswell council members revised an ordinance to limit the number of birds a resident can have. A Johns Creek resident settled a lawsuit the city brought against her for having chickens too close to a neighbor\u2019s property.<\/p>\n
So what? For Franklin, the decision to file a home farming bill was a \u201clightbulb-coming-on moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet others did not see the light, and criticized the bill as big government overreaching itself. The Georgia Municipal Association\u2019s response was typical.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt [opposition] has nothing to do with farm animals or gardens,\u201d said Amy Henderson, a spokeswoman for the association, whose membership includes more than 500 Georgia cities and towns. \u201cIt has to do with communities being told what to do by the state.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most municipalities, she noted, have no problem with home gardens; it\u2019s only when residents want to raise chickens or other creatures that some city councils say no.<\/p>\n
Others, such as Dunwoody blogger and gardener Pattie Baker, embraced Franklin\u2019s bill. A gardener growing some of her own food since just after 9\/11, she watched, dismayed, as her City Council last month shot down a proposal to allow chickens to be raised in backyards. Mayor Ken Wright cast the tie-breaking vote, 4-3.<\/p>\n
OK, said Baker, the idea didn\u2019t hatch \u2014 not this time, anyway. She thinks the City Council, as well as state lawmakers, may come around. \u201cI guess the fact that it was discussed at all is a big step forward,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Sandals vs. wing tips<\/p>\n
This would seem to be an issue that begs for stereotyping: the in-town crowd, with their Volvo wagons and organic cotton tees, vs. the suburbanites, with their Chevy Suburbans and polo shirts. One group is all for the right to grow food on their property; the other worries more about property values.<\/p>\n
Those stereotypes, insist the grow-your-own adherents, aren\u2019t fair.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not an East Coast-West Coast sort of thing, with the rest of the country in the middle,\u201d said Lisa Munniksma, managing editor of Urban Farm magazine. Launched last year, the Lexington, Ky., quarterly celebrates sustainable city living. \u201cThis is happening all over the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some people, said Munniksma, think landowners ought to be allowed to grow whatever they want on their own land, government prohibitions be damned. \u201cThat\u2019s pretty conservative,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Conservative and smart, says Franklin. Forbidding Georgians from using their land to feed themselves, he said, is \u201cSoviet-style, centralized planning.\u201d<\/p>\n
An unlikely champion<\/p>\n
The afternoon light, captured in half-full wine goblets, glowed like church windows. A handful of friends toasted day\u2019s end while their kids played nearby. Behind them, a guy yanked weeds from a plant bed. A little farther away, three women readied eggplant seedlings for replanting. A Volvo wagon, of course, was parked at the curb.<\/p>\n
Time seemed to slow at the Oakhurst Community Garden, a co-op where people have been growing good stuff since 1997.<\/p>\n
A bunch of closet socialists, anti-gun and pro-goat? Garden member Kathy Allen laughed. \u201cWell,\u201d she said, \u201cno one\u2019s said that to my face.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some garden members applauded when word got around about Franklin\u2019s bill. Then they learned more about their champion, a man who thinks Ronald Reagan set the standard for the American presidency. Yet Franklin, they discovered, wasn\u2019t above turning to another public figure \u2014 a woman, and a Democrat, at that \u2014 to plug his legislation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Michelle Obama can grow food at the White House, then no Georgia family should be denied the right to grow their own food, \u201c Franklin said last month, after the bill cleared the House Agriculture Committee. He and others then watched it wither and die in the House Rules Committee.<\/p>\n
The grow-your-own crowd sighed and turned back to their seed catalogs. Franklin started planning, too.<\/p>\n
To him, the logic behind the bill is as simple as a tomato sandwich. He had something good, served it with hardly any adornment and hoped his peers would gobble it up. They did not.<\/p>\n
So Franklin will bide his time. Another legislative season, he knows, will come. Some ideas, like tomatoes, chicken and goats, just need time to mature.<\/p>\n