The Case of the Illegal Vegetable Garden

A Florida town tells a couple to move their crops behind their house. Their reply: Lettuce be.

- Vicki Glembocki

FOR APPROXIMATELY 17 years, Hermine Ricketts and her husband, Tom Carroll, tended to their enormous vegetable garden in Miami Shores Village, Florida. The couple grew everything from onions and lettuce to 12 different varieties of Asian cabbage, some so exotic they couldn’t be found in grocery stores. Ricketts worked in the garden—planting, weeding, pruning—nearly every day. It easily saved them hundreds of dollars a year, since they grew about half of all the food they ate.