Imagine ripping out your Torrey Pines-like front lawn and replacing it with a vegetable garden.

It could probably get you tarred and feathered in emerald enclaves like Hilltop, Park Hill, Wash Park and Highlands Ranch.

But these are weird times.

A global energy crisis has sent food and gas prices through the ceiling, and Americans are starting to think outside the box.

In cities across the country, mavericks are planting vegetable gardens where lawns once grew.

In his book Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, Fritz Haeg writes: "The monoculture of one plant species covering our neighborhoods from coast to coast celebrates puritanical homogeneity and mindless conformity."

Kipp Nash of Boulder is living the dream. Three years ago he turned his neighbor's backyard into a vegetable garden. (Nash's own yard is too shady for a garden). Since then, Nash's garden empire has grown to include 13 front and back yards and a church plot in his south Boulder neighborhood of Martin Acres. Nash calls his venture Community Supported Agriculture.

It's both a business and a community project, with 25 active members. For a fee, you can get fresh vegetables once a week, or by lending your yard to the cause, you can get fresh produce for free.

Nash says people are hungry to learn about gardening, which helps with the workload. "We have a neat mixture of people with different interests, a crew of volunteers who weed and plant and basically want a better understanding of their food."

Nash, 31, is largely self-taught. He earned a degree in computer science and math from the University of Colorado but says it didn't take him long to figure out that his heart was in gardening. Six years ago he worked at an organic farm in Crested Butte and three years ago took the plunge and stuck the first spade in his neighbor's yard.

Not everyone likes the look, the smell of manure or the mud the plots create in winter, but Nash says most residents of the 1960s-era ranch-style tract- home neighborhood are supportive of the gardens.

Nash's crops include spinach, broccoli, arugula, carrots, eggplant and tomatoes. "I still struggle with tomatoes," he says, but the broccoli brings him pure joy. Nash, who drives a school bus in the winter, hopes to expand his operation to include fruit trees and a chicken co-operative.

Nash's counterpart in Denver is Debbie Dalrymple. She grows onions, herbs, zucchini, garlic, peppers, peas, radishes, Swiss chard and fennel in five backyards in Lakewood, Five Points and Washington Park. In her own yard, she tends a garden, watered by efficient drip irrigation, and keeps a large compost pile.

"I am really passionate about local food," said Dalrymple, 39, who also works as an IT consultant. "Whether your issue is your carbon footprint or health or taste, gardening is good for you on all those fronts."

Twenty people have shares in her gardens, and Dalrymple says she'd have many more if she had the resources and the time to develop more plots.

"I can't believe how interested people are in this," she said. She predicts that yard gardening will be common in five years.

You can read more about Nash's and Dalrymple's operations at senseofcolorado.com and www.communityrootsboulder.com.

Not that everyone embraces the concept.

I ran the idea of a front-yard vegetable patch by my husband, for example, and he thought it was one of the dumbest things he'd ever heard of.

My husband likes neat and orderly. He likes to mow on Saturdays and then turn around and water so that the lawn will grow so he can mow it again a week later.

He likes the soothing green expanses and the way the lawn frames the house. People who want big, hairy gardens should move to the country, he says.

If the price of groceries keeps going up, I tell him, we may have no choice but to join them.

mwinte@aol.com