I live next door to a guy who doesn't take care of his yard. It is very frustrating. I have been trying to establish, little by little, a 6ft buffer zone on his side by removal of ugly, rampant plants and more aggressive tree saplings to keep his mess out of my yard too. I am downhill so that makes for a problem because it all washes down each time it rains. Everything over there wants to grow this direction because the volunteer trees are so thick they are after my sun and to escape his jungle.

I am replacing the mess with hardy, aggressive but attractive plants I have been patiently rooting and cultivating to cover the ground so it will be visually better, not good, but better. This is keeping the tall weeds from taking over plus it makes me feel I have a small amount of control over my area. I have been working at this for three years now. Lots of trash collected, scratches, skeeters, hopping over the hog wire fence etc. Sometimes it took three weeks after a cleanup to have it disposed from my weekly garbage pickup. He had piled tree cuttings 4 feet high all along the property side and I bent over the fence and picked all this up. I collect the things that hold water to keep the mosquitos down. I have to go over or use a shovel handle if I can reach it.

But, I persist. I looked at it helplessly for 10 years and finally one day, I'd had enough. Something just cracked. Asking nice never helped. We tried that.

Call me Gladys Kravets.

Good luck to you.

The house next door to me is a duplex. The lady that owns it, lives at the far end. She doesn't get her lawn moved except less than once a month. It is covered with goat head grassy weeds.

I sprayed it twice to kill the weeds, and I put down pre emergent. Unfortunately that didn't help.

I move a stretch of 5 rows with my mower, when I mow my lawn.

But the mail man drags weeds over to my place every day. :(

Oh, and behind the house, she sprays every thing with round up. Got some of my plants already.

ARGH

Moni

Tree, if they are annual weeds, you can at least prevent them from setting seed by cutting the stalks at ground level. You may have to recut if the roots put back up shoots. We've been trying to eliminate poke that way this summer. And we can't blame anyone else. The stuff came up in our own fence row and we left it because my dad loves to eat it, but it simply throws too many seeds all of which come up in the garden and asparagus. It's been there five years or more so no digging, and since it is perrenial it will come up again next year--and probably the next, and next...but it won't mature seed again because we've decided to put a stop to that. Your weed may be an amaranth, some of which are prickly and have red stems. If so, they are annual.

Tree, I hope venting at least made you feel better. I know that when I need to vent and then do so, I always feel so much better afterwards.

It is really hard to be a gardener with problem neighbors. We had a neighbor like that in Fort Worth, but have marvelous neighbors here. Still, I haven't forgotten what it is like to have a pesky neighbor whose poor lawn maintenance practices cause issues in our plantings. When we decided to move to the country, getting away from the pesky neighbors was part of the decision-making process. We got lucky because all our neighbors here are wonderful.

Your weed does sound like it might be from the amaranth/pigweed family. I let one go to seed outside my garden once, and have been fighting its' seedlings ever since. If you cannot pull them, you still could cut them off at the ground level. Then, to keep them from regrowing, place cardboard or several layers of paper (I use shredded junk mail from the paper shredder) on top of them and put mulch on top of the cardboard or paper.

GreatPlains, We sit downhill from the adjacent property too, so we get lots of grass and weed seeds washing downhill into our yard and garden too. It only drives me crazy occasionally....like when we had 12.87" of rain in one day and 4" of soil mixed with plentiful amounts of weed seeds washed into the veggie garden, burying the young plants and their mulch beneath it. Luckily, a flash flood event like that is pretty rare. It probably worked out well for the garden in the long run, because most of that sandy soil washed into the lower end of the garden where the worst clay remains. The following winter, I rototilled all that sand and mulch into the garden which surely did improve all the clay there. I just wish the sand could wash down onto our property without bringing weed seeds with it, but that's never going to happen.

Dorothy, I think we must be too hot and too dry for poke to do well here. I will see 1 or 2 plants...maybe 3.....in a wet year. Wet years are rare, though, so they never really spread. I think poke plants are pretty, but I don't like eating poke sallet (my dad loved it) so there's really no reason to let it stay when it does pop up somewhere. Lambs quarters, though, are a perpetual nuisance. I've been working really hard this year to keep out the lambs quarters and pigweed, or at least to keep them from setting seed.

Moni, I hate those goathead stickers. Living in the country like we do, we have far too many of them. I try to get to them and remove them before they can set seed, but am not always successful.

I hate that the Round-up got some of your plants. That is incredibly frustrating. Living in a rural area where the farmers and ranchers use herbicides pretty regularly, I've lost lots of plants over the years to 2-4-d damage caused by herbicide drift, and some to Roundup. This year, I had 2-4-D damage hit a lot of my tomato plants sometime in May. They survived, but looked bad for a long time, remained stunted and produced less well than the plants not hit by herbicide-drift, and I was not a happy camper. Luckily, I plant far too many tomato plants, so having those plants affected didn't prevent us from getting a good crop. I never saw anyone around me spraying a herbicide (normally, if they're pulling a spray rig behind a tractor, I notice and start watching for herbicide-drift damage) but clearly someone did.

Dawn

Great Plains, you live in OKC, right? The code enforcement people should be able to make him clean up his yard. That's what I had to do about my neighbor. I hated to do it, first time I have ever called, but it was not getting taken care off. I live in The Village, where they take code enforcement very seriously, but OKC does too.

Lisa, I often thought of doing that.

We gave him some name of handy-man who would clean that up for around $100. Total. He said he was concerned about hiring someone with no insurance and just started mumbling. The 80 yr old man who is a dream neighbor on the other side of this guy and myself finally hauled big branches and part of a trunk down to the street 9 months after that ice storm. Messy yard neighbor came out all whining and pitiful looking and scrunched over like a victim and said "I've just been in a funk" and watched me, a woman and the 80 yr old man do that. This is how he always responds.

I don't do well with whining and helpless and actually thats the part that makes me angriest. However, the guy has something wrong with him so even though all of my buttons are being pushed, I cannot bring myself to turn him in because its mostly trees and brush around the perimeter, not weeds and yard junk, and they won't address that. If he was just a "pig" I would.

The solution I came up with sort of gets the aggression worked out of my system and I am 3 yrs into the challenge. I've rooted lots of plants and I almost enjoy planning this out. Its so much better than just sitting there fuming.

Dawn, that sounds like a heavy dose of herbicide. Are there health concerns? I don't like taking a walk when I can smell that stuff. The heavy use by so many people scares me here in the city.

This post was edited by GreatPlains1 on Tue, Mar 4, 14 at 4:59

I looked up amaranth weeds and that's what it is.
I've been cutting them off at ground level and they grow back.
I'll have to try the cardboard on a new flower bed I was putting in because there are about 100 in a 5x6 area that just keep growing back.
Thanks for your help.
Tree

GreatPlains, It really doesn't have to be a heavy dose of herbicides. Technology has simply given us better herbicides that can kill sensitive plants even at very small dosages. It doesn't help that tomato plants (along with maples and grapes) are incredibly sensitive to some herbicide formulations and can be damaged even at very low exposures. The damage I see tends to be minor and annoying, and while I'm never happy to see it, I know it could be a lot worse. It's been years since I've had a lot of plants killed by drift from someone else's herbicide.

Responsible farmers and ranchers choose their formulation, their spraying techniques, and their weather conditions carefully in order to prevent direct drift. It is the indirect drift from vaporizing herbicides that is difficult to prevent.

The herbicides they use nowadays are formulated in a way that means some of them (like 2-4-d and dicambra) can be sprayed on the plants, can hit the target plants, can dry, and then.....for up to the next 48 hours they can vaporize and drift through the air and hit your plants. What can you do to prevent that? Nothing, except that sometimes a person using herbicides can choose the herbicide formulation that is less likely to vaporize, though that doesn't necessarily mean that they do that.

Normally it is only the eastern edge of the fenced garden that gets hit by herbicide drift in the years when it happens, which I'd say is maybe one year out of three. Our property is more open to the east so there's nothing to block drift. To our north, west and south, we have acres and acres of woodland and we've never had herbicides hit our plantings from those three directions. To the east we have many ranches, county roads, a state highway, an interstate highway and a railroad track....all areas where herbicides often are used.

I have to give credit to the employees of our local electric co-op. They sprayed the right-of-way under the power lines in our neighborhood recently and even though they were spraying less than 100' from our fenced front garden, not one drop of drift hit my garden plants. That is pretty remarkable. So, obviously responsible herbicide spraying is possible.....but not everyone is concerned about where their herbicide drifts.

Sometimes I deliberately plant corn on the east side of the garden. Most of the herbicides that cause drift damage here are broadleaf weedkillers, so the corn isn't harmed by them, and I can use it as a buffer. It just happens that the tomato plants were on the eastern edge of the garden this year and they took the brunt of the herbicide damage. I never saw anyone spray anything during that time frame, so suspect this drift traveled some distance before it hit my plants. Luckily, the herbicides aren't systemic and don't reside in the living plants and don't reside in the soil.

Dawn

Okiedawn, The fear I was speaking of concerns people inhaling herbicides. When you can smell it, its hard to convince yourself its not harmful to people and animals. Is it a carcinogen?