I think that SE really needs to make this a separate feature from housing. Or at least put in an option for non home owners to use it somehow. There are just too many homes that I see where people don't have anything planted. They got their homes, but don't care for the gardening feature. This makes demand high for limited supply like Glazenuts, which can take a week + to get 1 seed for growing from a deluxe garden. It is really not fair to high population servers and I feel bad for them. They have more 'mouths to feed' then a low population server, yet have the same amount of homes to garden with available.
I don't know, maybe make gardening free to home owners, yet have a feature to pay a land tax to use a garden somewhere for people without houses. That is, if they still insist on keeping housing the way it has been.... which, if I had my way, it would be far more available to all the players.