What do you think???? I like to check in with friends and family when I am this pissed off…cause, well, I have a tendency to follow my knee jerk reaction, which is to rent the biggest truck I can find and just pile the compost in here now…. lol, but, since I know, I get a bit over emotional, I decided to ask anyone if they’ve ever ran into a problem like this and see what they did to solve it….
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I don’t know if I am over reacting….
We have hauled four loads of that free compost you get from the County into the yard. I have spread it around my Irises that were given to me, mixed it in with my hay bales in order to build soil in our ‘garden area’, we put it right by our front door on my flowers out front… (when you think of four loads, think of the back of a small pick up truck, our trailer was once the backend of a Ford Ranger) note: in our ‘garden area’ we have no topsoil, it’s all clay.. a contractor took it years ago, and it’s so hard, Clyde beat himself silly trying to till it last year and go no where with it…our last load went on the back lawn, we were told if we spread it a couple inches thick that the worms would carry it under ground and make our soil real spongy and healthy….
We were planning spreading it on both front and back lawns, around the flowers around the pond, and in my butterfly/hummerbird/bee corner… yes, basically on almost all of our little 1/2 acre.
And yes it smells.. there is manure in compost, is my guess. But the smell starting to wear off.. and most of it will be tilled under in the fall after gardening season is over…
Supposedly, our neighbors have gotten together and decided that we should not be spreading this compost on our yard anymore, and they want us to buy straw and cover it up.. geez, louise, how many inches of straw do they want?? I think it’s realistic to say that no straw is going to cover up what they don’t want.
The one neighbor that approached clyde said three neighbors had come to him about it.. first of all I don’t believe it.. but if it’s true, it’s probably the same three that demanded we cut down our trees as soon as we moved in….
The people who lived here before us manufactured dope, and we’ve been told the back yard was used as a dump and it was so bad that rats were all over the nieghborhood… We are cleaning the place up and trying to improve the lot.. so that someday we won’t have to haul any compost in… or at least very little…
My neighbor asked me tonight, if i don’t care about my neighbors… and you know, i see that as a mean tactic.. it’s not that I don’t care.. it’s that I’m looking at the big picture, and enjoying the fact that this is our first home, and I can actualy have a beautiful yard someday.. and I tried to explain that to him, and he kept asking me over and over again, “so do you care about your neighbors??”
I look at his stuff in his back yard every day.. he puts in furnaces for a living.. there are pipes and furnuce pieces.. and wires, and cables, and a shed that needs torn down..but it’s not my yard so I don’t worry about it. I don’t see it as my business.
I’ve tried to tell this story from the neighbors side and from my side, and I’ve taken college logic classes and I know good and well, I put an ’emotional appeal’ in this.. but right now I’m really emotional.
My neighbor said he wasn’t gonna talk to me ever again, he now has no use for me.. cause I said I told him I would not stop hauling compost in, and I invited him to hire an attorney if he wanted. My husband is mad at me because he doesn’t want to make enemies of the neighbors…. this is just stupid!
We live in an area that is zoned in the county.. we live down the road from a cow farm, across the freeway from Sheep farms… there is agriculture all around us… I don’t honestly get it.
Obviously, I need a 200 acre ranch…cause I think cow stuff doesn’t stink at all.. unless you get such massive quanities that it could probably be considered toxic waste…. my grandparents had a farm… it is part and parcel of growing up in the country.. yes, I come from a very long line of farmers…
I’m so sad… and mad…. have you ever heard of such a situation coming up ever?? And how did it go???
xoxoxo, peg
