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Legislative counsel briefs House panel on bill to bar HOAs and landlords from restricting vegetable gardens
Summary
Legislative counsel Cameron Wood told the House General committee that H 537 would bar homeowners associations and landlords from prohibiting or unreasonably restricting residents' vegetable gardens, define "vegetable garden," set a 60-day approval deadline for applications, allow reasonable maintenance rules, impose up to $1,000 civil penalty for intentional violations, and go into effect July 1, 2026.
Cameron Wood, legislative counsel, briefed the House General committee on H 537, a bill that "proposes to prohibit a landlord and a common interest community from restricting the installation and use of a vegetable garden," saying the measure would extend similar protections to tenants and unit owners.
Wood told the committee the draft places the common-interest provisions in Title 27A (the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act) and the landlord-tenant provisions in Title 9 (residential rental agreements). He said the bill defines a vegetable garden as "a plot of land where a person cultivates plants for personal consumption or donation," and expressly excludes cultivation of cannabis or other unlawful crops.
The bill would make covenant or bylaw provisions that "effectively prohibit or unreasonably restrict" gardens in areas designated for exclusive use void and unenforceable, while allowing associations to adopt "reasonable restrictions" such as requiring gardens visible from the street be maintained in good condition and that dead plant material and weeds be cleared, with limited exceptions for straw, mulch and compost. If an association requires an application to install a garden, the draft treats those applications like architectural modification requests: approvals or denials must be in writing, and if the association does not deny in writing within 60 days the application is deemed approved unless a reasonable request for additional information was made.
Wood said unit owners and successive owners would bear installation, maintenance and repair costs and must disclose the existence of a garden to prospective buyers; associations could restrict use of common property not designated for exclusive use. The draft also includes a civil penalty of up to $1,000 for intentional violations. Wood noted the draft currently excludes condominiums but advised the committee to consider whether that exclusion is appropriate given technical distinctions among planned communities and condominiums.
On the landlord-tenant side, Wood said landlords would have to permit tenants to grow vegetable gardens in "potable containers" in the tenant's private area; landlords could authorize in-ground gardens but could impose reasonable restrictions to prevent interference with maintenance, parking, egress, utility equipment or safety. The landlord provisions are silent about ownership of perennial plantings after tenancy and do not currently include a damages provision mirroring the common-interest section; Wood said the committee could add such language.
Committee members asked several clarifying questions. Representative O'Brien asked whether balcony container plantings would qualify; Wood said the residential language was drafted to guarantee potted/container plants and to give tenants a mechanism to request use of otherwise available space. Representative Boston questioned the bill's exclusion of cannabis cultivation given current personal-cultivation rules; Wood said he had not completed a deep analysis of cannabis statutes and included the exclusion to avoid importing unlawful-substance issues into the new definition. Representative Burkel and others raised the lack of a definition for "vegetable" (for example, whether tomatoes or edible flowers count); Wood suggested the committee could adopt language used by other states or refine the definition.
Wood cautioned that applying the bill retroactively to communities formed before 01/01/1999 could raise contract-impairment issues; the draft attempts to limit retroactivity by making the new section apply only to events occurring after 06/30/2026 and setting the act's effective date for 07/01/2026. He offered to return with more detailed background on common interest communities and statutory distinctions if the committee desired.
The briefing closed without a committee vote; Wood said he would provide additional comparative definitions from other states and could return to the committee with more detail.
