Planting in utility easement?
I talked to a neighbor last night (neighbor 1 if you look at my drawing) and he mentioned that they are thinking of moving. They are a couple a little older than we are but his wife has a number of medical problems and their kids want them to move closer to them when he retires in a year or so. The problem for them, just as it is for us, is the neighbor beside them, messy neighbor 2. The messy neighbors don't mow their yard until it is waist high and they never trim, so even after mowing their yard looks pretty bad. They also have broken chairs in the yard, and the house needs some maintenance.
We were going to sell our house this summer, but job timing isn't right yet, so we decided not to. We also wanted time to screen off those neighbors or wait until it didn't look so bad. We'd even considered waiting until winter and having someone mow and trim their yard so it would look ok for a few months. Neighbor 1 mentioned the same thing, only they thought they'd probably have to hire a service to do messy neighbor weekly since they want to sell in the spring. He wanted to know if it worked out that we put our houses on the market at the same time if we would go in together on a service to take care of messy neighbor's front yard.
I personally don't want to do anything for the messy neighbors. They have mooched off neighbor 3 for years until neighbor 3 finally got fed up with them, but it might be worth it to have their yard mowed if it would make the difference in selling quickly and getting the price we want.
But there's also the problem of messy neighbor's backyard, and that's where this question comes in. Messy neighbors have a couple of aggressive dogs so having their back yard done is out of the question. All we can do is screen it from our yard. But you can see in my drawing that we have an easement all around our yard, and sometimes the electric company comes in to work on the two power poles with transformers.
I'm not really worried about the legality of planting in the easement because as you can see, neighbor 4 planted right in the middle of it and other than trimming the photinias one time, the electric company hasn't done anything about those.
What I'd like to do is plant things that will screen the neighbors, quickly if possible, and not be so aggressive that it is a nuisance, and not tall enough to touch the overhead electric lines.
That completely rules out trees. The two existing shrubs in our yard in the easement are eleagnus and so far haven't gotten too tall. One mysteriously died out but the other two weren't affected by whatever it was that killed it. The seedlings from them are fairly annoying though.
Any ideas?
Also, do you see where the electric lines cuts across the corner of the backyard? Not in the easement. I'd like a tree in that corner since there isn't an overhead line. Any pros or cons there?
This post was edited by marti8a on Sat, Sep 27, 14 at 13:48
Lynn Marie
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Gretchen W.
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centexan254 zone 8 Temple, Tx
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