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"That's not what we want to see in a front yard," said Oak Park City Planner Kevin Rulkowski.

Why? The city is pointing to a code that says a front yard has to have suitable, live, plant material. The big question is what's "suitable?"

"If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster's dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what's common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers," the city bureaucrat said.

Husband tries to keep deceased wife's wishes by being buried in the front yard. The city is trying to move the grave site.

A police officer who wrote a $2,500 ticket to a mother on a public urination complaint against her 3-year-old son has been fired, City Manager Jim Crosby said Tuesday. Crosby said he fired officer Ken Qualls on Friday, following a hearing Nov. 14.
Prosecutors at the Canadian County district attorney's office declined to pursue the case against the mother, Crosby said.

The Michigan woman facing 93 days in jail for front yard gardening now faces new charges for having unlicensed dogs.

An Orlando man is fighting city officials to keep his vegetable garden in his front yard. You have to step over radishes, wax beans and kale to get to Jason Helvingston's front door in College Park. However, his 25 x 25 foot micro-irrigated vegetable garden is against city code, and the city of Orlando has asked Helvingston to dig it up by Wednesday.

Their front yard was torn up after replacing a sewer line, so instead of replacing the dirt with grass, one Oak Park woman put in a vegetable garden and now the city is seeing green.

The city then sent out code enforcement.

City code says that all unpaved portions of the site shall be planted with grass or ground cover or shrubbery or other suitable live plant material. Tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are what Basses see as suitable.

Gardeners aren’t generally known for their civil disobedience, yet in the last couple of years several have run afoul of local officials for tending vegetables in their front yards. In Ferguson, Mo., a stay-at-home father was ordered to dig up his 55 varieties of edible plants. In Tulsa, Okla., a gardener who didn’t want to remove her veggies and medicinal herbs saw them largely cleared by the city.

From a lemonade stand in her front yard, Cheyenee and her mother, Angela Seaux, sold the refreshing treat for $1 a cup. Her unique sales approach — waving her arms and yelling at neighborhood traffic to stop for a drink — worked as she quickly raised $97.

Neatly trimmed lawns and fixed picket fences could soon be the order of the day for not only homeowners in New York, but across America, if they want to avoid hefty fines and even jail time. In January, Linda Ruggles, 53, from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, was sentenced to ten days in jail after failing to pay a $480 fine for a having a messy yard. A month later, a Florida man was reportedly sentenced to a year and one day in jail after he failed to remove litter from the front of his house.