In 2013, Nicole and Dan Virgil lived in a lush, affluent suburb of Chicago. Dan had a good job. Nicole home-schooled their two kids.
Nicole decided to plant her own garden. She and her husband Dan, an engineer, don’t do things by half-measures. They watched YouTube videos on gardening, checked books out of the library and drew up plans. They built a raised bed and dug a wicking reservoir under it lined to store stormwater and drain the swampy, clay soils. They experimented with two plots. They dropped seeds directly into the spaded-up lawn and other seeds into a fertilized raised bed. Most seeds rotted in the clay soils of the lawn. Those that germinated did not thrive in the nutrient-poor earth, but the seeds in the raised bed sprang up in a few days and thrived, producing in coming months vegetables of deep vibrant colors that were delicious.
Autumn comes swiftly to Chicagoland. The Virgils hated to stop gardening. On the web, Nicole noticed farmers in Maine extended the growing season with long, plastic tunnels called hoop houses. You can buy hoop house kits for a couple of hundred dollars, but the Virgils are DIY people. Dan drew up plans for a wood frame connected with PVC pipes. He shored up the supports so the tunnel could withstand 80 mph winds and heavy snow loads. He carefully calculated the height and width of the tunnel to maximize the buildup of passive solar heating inside. They located the hoop house in the middle of the backyard, so it was not visible from the street.
The one thing the Virgils did not think about was the city’s zoning board. Dan and Nicole had lived in Elmhurst for several decades. Elmhurst is a town of squat, white-trimmed, yellow-brick ranch houses placed in the center of spacious lots like iced pastries on a tray. Green lawns frame the houses. The lawns are largely unfenced, rolling along block after block, connecting one neighbor to another, a green communal thread. The Virgils saw neighbors build hockey rinks in their front yards and assemble trampolines and outdoor living rooms in their backyards. They figured the hoop house fell in the same category of a temporary recreational structure. They didn’t count on one neighbor calling the city, asking if the hoop house needed a permit.
One day, they came home to find a Property Maintenance Violation Notice on their front door. The city required a permit for their “greenhouse.” The Virgils stopped building. Dan went down to City Hall and explained their goal—to extend the growing season for a few months. They were not building a greenhouse. They’d take the hoop house down in the spring. He came away with the understanding that as long as the tunnel was temporary, it was ok, like the skating rinks and summer cabanas.
The bloody NIMBY and HOA shit.
Feel like the neighbors that complained should be named, shamed, and had the ire of the state turned on them. They seem to have poor empathy, so maybe some personal experience would stir some up in them.
Empathy is not often learned by being oppressed in any way. It only comes from seeing others as equals, worthy of kindness and respect.
Yeah unfortunately people like this never learn empathy, they just feel persecuted and fight back even harder.
It would have been easy enough for Elmhurst officials to investigate, but they didn’t. … Instead, Elmhurst city officials poured thousands of dollars into judicial procedures and attorney fees to prosecute the Virgils. The case generated hundreds of hours in hearings and staff research. Why did they go to such expense and trouble?
The answer is exactly what I assumed before I started reading. This is a photo of Nicole Virgil.
Ah of course, the classic criminal enterprise of doing anything while black.
Nicole asked around among her friends. “Where do you get real food?”
They stared at her, not comprehending her question.
“Whole Foods?”
Nicole drifted through the aisles of expensive, organic food. Even pricey lettuce after a few days in the fridge wilted and turned slimy. She felt trapped, confined to the industrial food distribution network that girdled the globe.
I could try to grow a head of lettuce, she thought. It can’t be that hard. She was not indentured to the corporate grocer. She was free. Free to grow a head of lettuce. Maybe more.
For anyone who isn’t in a position to grow their own food and also has this question, look into Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). At the start of the year, you buy a share in a local farm, and you get a box of veggies every week of the growing season. [There are variations: you can get a large box or a small box, you can choose to get a box just on alternate weeks, etc.] By having their money up front, the farmer is no longer at the mercy of start-of-season bank loans and the risk of a bad harvest: the farm is guaranteed to survive to the following year. In exchange, you get a box of peak produce: no lettuce that’s been making it’s way through distributors for three weeks, or apples that have been warehoused for nine months. No food that’s traveled halfway across the world - everything is small scale, seasonal, and incredibly fresh.
My parents have belonged to one of those for years. One of the cool things about theirs is their farm usually grows much different varieties of vegetables than you can find in regular grocery stores. They regularly get white and purple carrots, and some variety of orange carrot that has a little bit of a peppery/gingery bite to it. One year they got some heirloom variety of celery which had too much flavor eat raw. Imagine biting into a stick of celery and being physically overwhelmed by the amount of celery flavor you’re experiencing, like, “Jesus Christ… the celery… too… powerful…” It was absolutely killer in soups though.
You have cool parents null
I’ve belonged to a few different ones (moved a couple times, one wasn’t a great fit, and one farmer retired during the pandemic), and there’s always something new. Not just heirloom tomatoes and different types of hot peppers, but odd varieties of herbs (lemon basil is fantastic!), odd fruits like paw paws, ground cherries and incredibly fresh Asian pears, weird upscale vegetables that you usually only get at higher priced restaurants and groceries, etc.
Between my boxed farm share and the pick your own extras that come with it, it’s probably about 80% of my veggies for the entire year.
People get weird about gardens.
when I was in apartments, I set up a few living walls as well as towers instead of giant pots to grow fruits and veggies, (and when it wasn’t winter out, full on aeroponic racks out on the porch.)
one of my neighbors was a slightly-older karen who kept freaking out and calling the cops (starting with 911, then the local non-emergency, then the sheriffs, DEA, then fucking highway patrol. anybody who would still take her call.)
Fucking sheriffs tore every plant out of their racks because they couldn’t tell the difference between fucking cabbage and weed. At some point she overheard the sheriffs talking about my 3d printers and started reporting me for “printing guns” which was another whole ball of fun.
It was bad enough the property management assholes tried to evict me because the cops kept showing up, rather than evicting the nuisance caller who was lying her little ass off to try and fuck me over. All because she was incapable of having the thought that you could grow more than just weed in aero racks. (not that she knew they were aero. she kept reporting them as hydro.)
that is so goddamn infuriating and unfair. I’m sorry you had to deal with this. it’s a shame that the people involved just got away with it. life is unfair and it sucks.
so what I take away from this nowadays is that we goddamn well betterr make sure the assholes pay for it when we can actually make it happen
So, like, the sheriff’s office did pay for the damages they caused, and a bit extra. But the reality is cops do this all the fucking time, pretty much everywhere in this country. I’m far from the most egregious example; and the county did end up making me whole. (IIRC, the individual officers eventually got yeeted from the agency. Probably violating people’s rights someplace outs.)
The lady got fined into irrelevance, and the apartments evicted her as part of the settlement for their people letting them in.
The lesson here is that you should politely invite your local Karen over to dinner, to calmly and respectfully discuss the matter once and for all. In between sips of wine and canapés, bludgeon her to death, flay her and wear her skin. Call the city impersonating her in order to cancel all previous complaints.
Then set your grill to 225F and smoke your long pork for 4 hours. Enjoy with a side of backyard veggies.
Woah! 4 hours is nowhere near long enough on the smoker for someone that dense
Choice cuts naturally. 12 hrs if whole on a spit.
Well that escalated quickly.
I’d suggest composting though. Prion disease isn’t something anyone wants.
No CNS tissue. Just the meat. I mean, the whole point was to get free food from the sweat of your brow and teach the children lessons that needed to be learned.
Or, beat her at her own game. Keep doing perfectly reasonable shit that just so happens to infuriate her. Work with the police every time they come. Explain that you’re just doing hobby work. Let her paint a picture of herself as an untrustworthy cunt who keeps waisting everyone’s time. Eventually, end it all with a restraining order against her.
It’s another possibility, I guess.
Nicole recalls a woman snapping photos and calling her friend. “Did you know, lettuce grows from DIRT?!”
🤦♂️
Idiocracy/Wall-E come to life.
Good article.
Having seen the photo in the article about their hoop house, I can see why the city considered it a greenhouse. Hell, that thing is bigger than most residential greenhouses I’ve seen.
But what kind of a miserable shrew of a neighbor snitches on something like that?! It’s a fucking greenhouse! Big deal!
It’s awesome that this lady and her husband put that much work in and got so much success growing their own veggies. Like the article says, they are great examples to their kids, and to other people. If one of my neighbors went all-in like that I’d be cheering them on and getting inspired by them.
It’s also sad that race seems to be an issue. But not unsurprising, if true.
Residential food gardens will continue to become an increasingly important and popular topic. With food prices rising and food quality declining, people will gravitate to it, like this family did. It’s one thing if you’re growing food on an industrial level in your yard. But few people are and will be doing that. Zoning permits should be relaxed a big in these cases.
The minute I saw it was in Elmhurst and that she was black, I knew what it was about. I’m glad it’s not what comes to her mind first, it’s a better way to live.
At council meetings over several years, less than a dozen people spoke against the hoop house while hundreds voiced support. Some supporters claimed racism was the underlying cause. Dan is white. Nicole is Black in a city that is 94 percent white.
Good read! Notable:
The City of Chicago allowed hoop houses. They could not find any rules banning hoop houses in the Elmhurst City Code. Indeed, their citations listed no code violation at all. They asked what code or ordinance they had transgressed. City staff didn’t know. They said they would get back to them on that. A letter arrived a few weeks later stating they had violated two codes, one about occupancy of a tent or temporary structure in a residential zone and the other from the permanent building code banning membrane structures altogether. That was confusing. How could the hoop house be both a temporary and a permanent structure?
Then the city council member speculating it could be for growing pot. Yeah, “it’s not a race thing.” Go live in a fucking HOA, ya duds.
Then the city council member speculating it could be for growing pot. Yeah, “it’s not a race thing.” Go live in a fucking HOA, ya duds
sounds like my experience (mentioned above). I had living walls for things like cabbage, romaine, strawberries, some melons. tomatoes and potatoes, green beans, etc.
though… also, I’m white, so it was almost certainly worse for them.
No normal person homeschools their children. Change my mind.
Being normal is not always the best choice in a world that normalizes a lot of terrible and mediocre shit. There are two sides to the normal curve, and I’d argue that only one side is objectively bad to be on.
I was private schooled for a few years, homeschooled for a few more, and public schooled for the rest (which was by far the worst years, but apparently my parents felt it was necessary for me to develop “socialization” pfft). Granted, that’s not anywhere near the same as being homeschooled for your entire childhood, and it was certainly for different reasons than most of the reasons that make homeschooling popular, but it was a unique and enriching experience, at least for me, and I’m thankful for the abnormal upbringing. It gave me a lot of perspective. Also my mother and grandmother who did the bulk of the homeschooling are smart people, well-educated themselves, and I don’t think that’s true of most homeschooling situations. Which is really the concerning part.
I don’t have kids but why the fuck would I want the state propagandizing my kids with their national, Christofascist myths? Teaching revised history, imperialist messianic stories of the US’ greatness in the world and at home. Teaching kids that capitalism and colonialism are just fine and maybe just need a few tweaks here and there, certainly not that white supremacy is the cornerstone of this empire.
And BTW, a lot of progressive black people do homeschool their kids exactly for some of the same reasons. Even if they aren’t anticapitalist, they’re still against white supremacy and white saviorism.
Not to mention the horrid administrations in many schools fucking over teachers and children alike. Abuse and manipulation are rampant, policies like zero-tolerance are idiotic as best and outright malicious at worst. Queerphobia is rampant at schools, critical thought is suppressed, and imagination/creativity are crushed. The institution of organized education in the US was created by Rockefeller to create obedient little factory workers, and frankly, I haven’t seen any foundational improvements to suggest its anything else now.
Some other things: the food is downright nutritionally deficient and is awful in terms of quality. Children are required to use garbage Chromebooks with software meant to continue the mindless droll, while the programs and curriculums center around these uninspired and centralized computers. The kids no longer learn how to use real world (complicated but creative) software, let alone how to use it responsibly. Every year creative courses get cut and funding reduced, while recess and gym get shorter and less involved. There is no room for risk, no room for failure, no space to be a child anymore.
And I want to end all of this by saying one very importany thing. Most of these awful decisions and my complaints are not against working class people trying their best, and simply surviving. This is against government decisions, it’s against high level adminstration like superintendents getting paid hundreds of thousands a year. It’s against the system itself.
When I was in third and fourth grade, I was in the TAG program - “talented and gifted”. But I failed fourth grade. The school district called my parents in to have a meeting. They wanted my parents to sign custody of me over to the state to be placed in a state institution until such time as the state released me (i.e. not necessarily even at 18).
My parents said “No fucking way.”
The closest private school to us was 45 minutes away, so they homeschooled me.
I finally got my ADHD diagnosis when I was 30 years old.
So there’s two normal people who homeschooled their child.
That said, I do have mixed feelings about homeschooling because many abuse it to indoctrinate their children in religious lies.
But I’m a good example of a case where if they had not homeschooled me, I’d probably have become institutionalized.
I’ve had a hard life and still do, but I’m much better off with my homeschool education than I would have been as a ward of the state, thanks.
When local schools lack resources to staff classrooms, homeschooling is increasingly normalized.
How many kids get shot while homeschooling ?
Probably a lot more than you’d think.
How many kids get an actual education while homeschooling?
Pretty sure kids are more likely to get shot (accidentally) in the home than at school.
Have you been to rural Alaska? Not a whole lot of schools around. Outside of that, I agree with you.
I would say that a person from rural Alaska is not a typical person.
Not the point of the article at all. Way to show you didn’t read shit
