The Los Angeles-based artist and architect Fritz Haeg wants to destroy your front lawn. Having declared war on lush tracts of what he sees as pointless green, Haeg can regularly be found donning yellow garden clogs to labor in the dirt, tearing established sod from suburban earth and replacing it with food-producing gardens. Under his movement, Edible Estates, instead of sweating out summers with lawnmowers and weed whackers, you could be harvesting juicy tomatoes, crisp green beans, plump eggplants, and enough exotic herbs to make your foodie friends jealous.

But it's not just about the food. "The lawn is an actively antisocial space that also requires a certain amount of maintenance and resources, which are wasted on something we don't even use," the 38-year-old Haeg tells me when we meet up in New York. "Growing food is one of the most basic acts of civilization. And yet, we've come so far away from that."

Edible Estates aims to address a host of issues, including water usage, pesticides, global food production, and human relationships. "Private property is one of the few places where each individual has some control over the direction they want the world to go in," says Haeg, who, standing six foot three and sporting a shaved head, looks like he's not afraid of getting his hands dirty. "I'm interested in people rediscovering their sense of power."

The closely cropped lawn — once a status symbol — was popularized in the 18th century by English landscape designers like Capability Brown, and proudly rolled out at George Washington's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. But it has since lost its image of opulence. Hoping to inspire homeowners to follow his lead, Haeg is in the process of establishing nine prototype front-lawn gardens, each with a unique design tailored to its regional climate. Using volunteer labor and plants donated by local nurseries, he symbolically established the first garden in Salina, Kansas — near the geographic center of the continental United States — on Independence Day, 2005. "Like most homeowners, I was tired of cutting the grass," admits owner Stan Cox, who, along with his wife, Priti, was happy to see the lawn go. Instead of grass trimmings, the couple now harvests everything from strawberries and peaches to Swiss chard and green chilis. "We probably met more of the people on the block, and had more interaction with them, because of the garden," says Cox, who is quick to point out that he spends about as much time pruning and weeding as he previously invested in mowing, but that "it's much higher quality time." And he's had no complaints from pesky neighbors.

Putting calls out on the Web for other willing home-owners, Haeg soon found families in Lakewood, California (a suburb of Los Angeles), and Maplewood, New Jersey (a suburb of New York), and deftly disposed of their lawns as well. London's Tate Modern caught on to what was happening and commissioned him to build one for a public-housing complex in a neighborhood just south of the museum.