What if gardens replaced grass yards?

What is the value of a grassy yard?  Why is it always in the picture of an ideal house? Do we really need grass to hold the place around the house between the street and other houses?

It has uses and advantages. Children can play there. Grass tends to have dense enough roots to hold soil firmly even if it dies back in winter.

But there are disadvantage too. Most grass needs to be mowed; depending on the type of grass and the amount of moisture, this can be a frequent chore. And to look good it needs to be fertilized and weeded. It is very easy to put more than enough fertilizer which then causes streams to receive the burst of nutrients after each rain (adding to the pollution from other sources they already carry). It is a lot of work and consequence for a grass yard.

Why aren’t more grassy areas being turned into gardens? Food prices are going up but they have not gone up enough to motivate many of us to become new gardeners. I am a small time gardener but I have big ideas. I’m not going to enlarge my garden bed this year but I am going to plant more food items than flowers like I have in previous years. And maybe I’ll get even more ambitious in 2014 and make a larger garden where the grass still grows in 2013.