I confess: I am probably a bad neighbor.

No, we don't blare dubstep or dancehall or ghettoslam (or whatever the current sonic terror may be) at 200 decibels…

And we don't burn piles of tires and carpeting in the front yard…

And, most certainly, we're not dumping diesel into the local creek…

However, we have – oh, the horror! – utterly given up on maintaining the front lawn on our semi-rural piece of the South; instead, it's been replaced with a nascent food-generation machine.

Out with the lawnmower – in with a food forest.

The idea of a "food forest" or an edible "forest garden" is as old as Eden, but only in recent years has it started to make a comeback as a food-production strategy.