What did you do to make your neighbors think you are crazy?

Hello fellow weirdos! ;)

I dance up to the line and a little over in the front where people can see from the sidewalk. Outside of the food beds I'd call our gardening style cottage garden meets wild type. The thing that keeps most people at bay is the large amount of flowering plants and flowering LONG into season. Still...people stop. Most comments are good but every once in a while someone can't stand what they feel like is disorder. My favorite was when I was on all fours weeding and a couple walk up and stop. She's commenting on how she likes the flowers while he said, "What a f%&$ing mess! Who could live in this brush pile?!?"
She asked what was wrong with it and he said there wasn't enough lawn and no structure. Little did he know, I murdered the lawn and I'm still doing it. Additionally, I worked hard for YEARS to get flowering resources and foodplants for as long as temperatures allow. The very bees and butterflies they BOTH commented on were testament.

I scavenge hundreds of bags of leaves each Fall. I get caught several times a year...usually in alleys. Suspicious looks and often comments. Worse...my neighbors see me bringing them all on property...as they or more likely their property managers (lots of apartments) try to get rid of theirs.

The back is closed in. All manner of weird goes on back there. The funniest is about four years ago when neighbors who lived on 2nd and 3rd floors around me started seeing deeply dug beds (about 3 feet or so) that remained open for long periods while I filled them slowly. Word started going around that I had dug graves. It didn't help that like another on this thread, if we are still working and it gets dark, we strap on the headlamps. I said nothing to kill the rumors. :D


There was the time when we had to process over a hundred pounds of free pawpaws from an orchard that no longer exists. Foldout table in the front yard and mass carnage.

The few who go between houses may see the compost bins. But they also see numerous screens with drying eggshells on them...about 1500+ a week. Tubs are all over the place catching water. Waist-to-shoulder height poles hold giant garden scoops/funnels made from laundry bottles. 8 foot high steel racks were turned into arbors to go over the paths between food production beds. People don't know what to make of them.

I scrounge bricks and limestone foundation blocks whenever I can. People see them being unloaded...from my car (no truck).

In order to shelter a bunch of end of season plant purchases (steep discounts), I built a large igloo looking thing with piles of leaf bags. When I apologized for the view to my neighbor to the south he said, "No problem at all. I think it's neat...like most of the stuff y'all are doing. It's always interesting to walk out the back door and look over the fence." They're the only ones we are completely honest with. They know about all the bat habitat, sheltering Argiope aurantia spider egg sacs, opossum & racoon feeding, large compost bins, and plans for beehives.

If they didn't talk enough, Halloween brings out the wolf-bride (vintage Victorian dress) for the front door. The comments heard are often hilarious. A good many are so creeped out that they walk briskly by or even cross the street.

Ms Minarosa picks up compostables at the office. Coffee grounds, eggshells, etc. Also when there are catered parties (common) before leftovers get tossed, she grabs anything we can feed to critters and/or compost.

Sometimes we too get comments like, "I wondered what kind of people lived in that house."

Before leaf-out, you can see brush piles behind planted areas. That gets more camouflaged within the next couple of months.

"Why on earth would ANYONE plant milkweed!?!"

"Those are for LIZARDS?!?"

"What the hell nests in a box THAT big?!?"

"I wonder what the neighbors think about living next to them?"

People catching a whiff of the SCOBY trimmings as I offload them from the car to go to the compost, "Good lord! Who would want to bring that ONTO their property?" ...followed by "It was IN HIS CAR!!!"

"Who works on their garden all day in the middle of winter?"

Apparently a picture also needs 1000 words...

OMG... I love this thread and all of you.  DHB (Dear Hunny Bunny) and I are NOT alone.  I am allergic to grass - some more than others - but all of them to some extent.  I see no reason to cultivate huge swaths of it.  If I want a green, foot friendly covering I'll plant moss, chamomile, clover, ajuga, sedum, thyme, phlox, or whatever seems nice underfoot and grows well in that particular location.  While I don't garden naked, I do generally garden barefoot.  I get home from work and the first things to come off are always my shoes.  

Our neighbors thought we'd lost our minds when we replaced the "perfectly good" chain link fence with Red Brand wire fencing that we double stacked into an 8' high fence with T-posts.  The idea was to be able to keep the local feral hogs out and keep our critters in.  The old 4' high wavy nearly falling in spots chain link was no longer up to the task.  Most of my right leg is titanium and I could jump or just step over the old fence in places.  No way was that going to keep the puppers in much less anything that really likes to jump.  

its my last summer at this house and i plan on doing some crazy stuff like putting some massive plants on the roof and in the front yard
usually i have them all hidden in the backyard

We lived aboard a sailboat at a fancy Toronto yacht club for a number of years.  We had a couple of okay neighbours there, but mostly the people were intolerant, entitled, ignorant, rich old geezers.  They thought everything we did was crazy, from not eating the overpriced self proclaimed 'gourmet' food and tortured meat products in the swanky restaurant (it was all from Sysco) to threatening to report them to the government if they didn't stop destroying barn swallow nests on the clubhouse.  Which, by the way, they had designed to look like a barn.  

But the best was a couple of years ago.  Canada had offered asylum to thousands of displaced people from the war in Syria, and all kinds of individuals, groups and organisations were doing what they could to help the newcomers settle in, offering jobs, homes, food, money etc etc.  At our AGM that year, after a succession of members (and they were members) stood up to complain out of nowhere that The Liberals were trying to Destroy Christmas, my wife Kristina took the mike to suggest that the club might like to sponsor a family of Syrian refugees.   They could have easily done it. They'd just allocated thirty thousand dollars to replace the perfectly functional chairs in the restaurant ffs.  Money no object for that.  But instead, a weird silence descended.  It was thick, dense, and heavy, like peanut butter after the oil's separated out.  I've never heard a silence quite like it; the sound of privilege strangling conscience, maybe.  Nobody looked up, nobody coughed, nobody was even audibly breathing.  And eventually, the Chair of the board, having completely ignored the point, moved to adjourn the meeting.  Which seemed to wake everybody up and suddenly there were people seconding, raiding their hands, shouting Aye, and heading for the door.  Clearly, everyone in the room thought she was crazy for even suggesting such a thing,

It didn't take much.  Here I am living in a rural area and they can't stop talking about the fact that I invited them over for "tea" and it was made out of the mint that I was growing. . .Crazy, crazy.  

My neighbors can't see us very well as our house is far back from the road. So far, they think we're 'mostly harmless'. We interact online a lot, hence the 'mostly' part, but otherwise aside from me going for walks up our long driveway in pajamas (we're very rural and there's little road traffic) their attitude may change once I start that burying-wood-and-planting-stuff-atop-it-thing. One never knows, they might like that sort of activity as I see them as potential permie goofballs.

Paul, "mostly harmless" is good. "Mostly harmless and possibly beneficial" is a solid goal to work on, at least to my mind. A jar of jam from local fruit? Gold. A skill they don't have, like sharpening stuff or flinging surplus REAL tomatoes everywhere? Platinum. Teaching people to do these things? Unobtanium! Except it's not; it just takes long patience.

I collect pee in a watering can and then pour it around the garden.

Sherri Lynn wrote:It didn't take much.  Here I am living in a rural area and they can't stop talking about the fact that I invited them over for "tea" and it was made out of the mint that I was growing. . .Crazy, crazy.  

Its great that you got them over for yea; but its sad that they never have thought about doing it themselves. what if you were to start an impromptu weekly gathering, call it  The community/road/are name gathering; like here, it would be  The Tacoma Rd Gathering, and  start with teaching how to grow mint for their own use. Then go to chamomile; then lavender...or whatever herb is due to be harvested, or fruit or veggie is ripe that week.

Knowledge is power

Monica Egger wrote:I collect pee in a watering can and then pour it around the garden.

Will this work for squirrels?

Back  in 1992, when I moved from a house with good size garden to a small townhouse with concrete patio (not my choice, but best I could do at the time), I took my tomatoes with me in the 5 gallon buckets they were growing in, covered in almost ripe and unripe fruit. My friend helping me move told me, "you know some of these are not going to be "vine ripened", eh?". The new neighbors immediately dubbed me the "mad gardener".

When I moved again in 2003 from that townhouse to a rural rental in an isolated area, I didn't take tomato plants, but I did take my compost bins - and their contents :)

Living here for ten years and still not having a well but having 12 acres fenced in with meat goats on it.

I’m trapped in central Oregon due to CoVid19 and can’t return to China where I’ve lived for the past 10years. So, I’m staying at my business partner’s home in a standard urban subdivision. With his permission and help, we rototilled out all the lawn on a 50x100 house lot and replaced it all with wood chips we got for free from the city’s wood lot. That raised eyebrows among the older neighbors. Then I scored 80 bales of spoiled straw and mulched the entire place. More eyebrows went up. Meanwhile I put in a no till mixed square-foot garden in the back yard, straw bale raised beds and plunge planted all the soil blocks of approximately 35 varieties of vegetables in companion patterns (I had to have something to eat!). That was last summer. This year I put in two strawberry beds and told everyone that came by to pick a few during their evening walk to snack on. Now I’m giving away all of last year’s annual starts that I sprouted. The neighbor are now stopping to chat and ask what am I doing next. I now know more neighbors than my business partner who has lived here almost 4 years. I’ve also given at least a half dozen chats regarding permaculture to traditional gardeners. Most are older and no-till, no-weed really appeals to them!

^^Colossal!^^

I have a couple of neighbors who are used to me, to one extent or the other. One gardens (not organic or well designed) and walks her dog. On their walk this  morning, she stopped by to see what I was doing in the garden today.
She has learned the phrase "I'm seeding this plant" meaning I'm taking the seeds to grow them...
She looked at what I was doing and said "Oh no, you are seeding those weeds, aren't you?!"  
Yup. That I am.  
"Do I dare ask why?"
Yellow wood sorrel! Tastes like lemons, I love it!
"I learn a lot on my walks..... "  

:D

I collect pee in a watering can and then pour it around the garden.

Will this work for squirrels?

It might.  We used to live next door to a house with three unfixed tom cats who thought nothing of wandering into our house, beating up our two fixed kitties, eating their food, then spraying on the way out.  But they stopped after I started peeing around the house on a nightly basis.  I don't know if the neighbours thought we were crazy or not, but even if they did it wouldn't count because they were way crazier than us.

* That I will not fill in my grey water pond with gravel (to look better and deter snakes) which will also cause all of my property to flood.
* Compost pile (trashy)
* Putting cardboard down to kill the grass without chemicals.
* Saving empty kitty litter jugs for various uses around the property.
* Harvesting “weeds” for edible and medicinal uses.
* Taking pictures of everything on my property to properly identify.
* Rescuing all the abused and abandoned animals.
* Not wanting to garden over the septic field.
* Wanting to preserve what trees are left.
* Not eating, shooting, toxic spraying, killing any and everything that lives on the property.
🙄🤪😊
They can really eye roll when I go solar and collect the rains.

I am about to bury a bathtub in the front yard to make a little pond.  We'll see what kind of looks I get.

Flora Eerschay wrote:Just the things I put in my compost bin might make my neighbours think I'm crazy... I hope they don't see all of it!

And the fences I build are so "artistic" that even other permies think I'm weird...

Can we see some of your fences?

I think throwing pee from a tree is justice. Trees fighting back. Love it!

Thats awesome. tell me about your land man!

The same neighbor from above https://permies.com/t/120/157962/neighbors-crazy#1280456 was walking the dog again. She stopped by, she asked what I was planting "Assorted alliums, I'm not really sure what some of these are. Garlicky oniony things!"

"You are burying garbage? And going to pull all those wood chunks out I guess?" "Just kitchen scraps, adds nutrients to the soil, I don't have a compost pile, so I bury the plant scraps. And I'll bury the wood back down, it's nicely rotted, I think it was tree roots from a tree that was cut years ago, from the looks of it."

"Why are you not planting right there?" "I promised a salamander I wouldn't." (Speckled Black Salamander) "You promised a salamander?" "It was really not happy with being dug up, so I moved it to a safe area and promised to leave it alone."  

"Mmmmkay.... Oh, there's a big spider right by your head!"  "I put her there, it's a good place for a spider, she'll like it there."

"Promising salamanders things, burying garbage, moving spiders, planting things you aren't sure what they are... If you ever went crazy, how would I know?" "If I buy a TV and a microwave and start eating Twinkies, get me help, I'm very broken. Talking to the animals and plants means I'm fine!"
She just laughed and shook her head....

:D

I think I've thoroughly convinced my neighbors that I'm nuts.

1. A bunch of persimmon saplings came up covering half an acre. I let them grow, all 500 plus of them. It became copse #1.

2. I planted a hedge out of hazel in America where maintenance-free boxwood is the norm. I'm going to lay it in the English fashion.

3. My second garden site turned into a thornless thistle jungle. I let it grow for biochar. It's standing dead right now waiting for me to burn it.

4. I couldn't mow while hospitalized so when I came home and saw 1 ft tall grass, I just noped right out of mowing it until fall. Besides, I planted a bazillion tiny trees and don't know where exactly. I have a general notion of "in the pasture", but I forget where the edges are. That's copse #2.

5. I eat bugs. And brought toasted grasshoppers to the neighborhood bbq as a beer snack. This is my #1 reason not to spray pesticides. Because bugs are tasty. Neighbor's kids liked them.

6. My tomatoes I direct sowed are producing 3-4 lb fruit and I'm giving them away because I'm sick of tomatoes and they bother my stress ulcer anyways.  

This list would be a lot longer if it wasn't all about permaculture. I'm just crazy in general. It was actually hard to think of normal gardening stuff that people would think was nuts because of the avalanche of ideas of other crazy shit I do...

Pearl Sutton wrote:..... and start eating Twinkies, get me help, I'm very broken..

I'm reasonably Permie on many fronts but put a Twinkie within earshot and I'm like Ulysses trying to fend off the Sirens. The Lotus Fruit cannot compare....(sighs and hangs head)  Can I blame it on my upbringing?.....Just this once?   ;-)

Back in the late 80's was living and working in London and lived in a terrace house with a long narrow garden overlooked by the houses on either side. Husband built a compost bin for me at the back of the garden and I regularly used to add our food scraps and garden waste, ensuring that I buried the food scraps to reduce smells and rodents.

After several months, bumped into the neighbour and they asked me what I was burying at the back of the garden and were visibly relieved to learn that it was only food scraps. She jokingly said that she thought I'd chopped up my husband and was composting him!

Hi,

Hahahaha,

I promise I am A good person who is Not insane!

1. Making fireworks,
2. turning pens into powerful projectiles,
3. talking to birds and animals, and memorising in to try and learn what they are trying to communicate.
4. Cross breeding Plants,
5. farming insects
6. wood carving
7. whittling
8, love spoon carving
9. hedging
10. Making anaerobic compost and watering it into aerated lawn
11. building animal habitats,
12. Learning Russian
13. Fire experiments
14. fire gardening
15. Tool restoration
16. tool sharpening
17. Making electronics
18. Stone carving
19. Flint knapping
20. making fires from spark rocks,
21. Making fires from friction
22. Non English based music phase.
23. Metal working phase
24. all the digging works.
25. My one month of walking except for eating sleeping and hygiene.
26. topiary
27. Plant propagation
28. Worm systems
29. Going bush to expand the soil environment.
30 creating a seed bank
31. Studying astronomy
32. chemistry
33. Hydrology
34. Pest management
35. Brick laying
36. Going to work on a cattle station,
37. Magnetic field experiments,
38. Bush crafting
39. Sewing
40. Latin
41. dancing for really long periods of time
42. Cleaning
43. Light experiments
44. Baking
45. Minimalism phase
46. Yoga
47. Reading books before going to yoga "being called the Yoga book Guy"
48. walking really fast, "that guy from Uni who walks fast"
49. Dressing well
50. Dressing practically
51. Embroidering my handkerchiefs with my initials
52. Helping people All the time
53. Being ridiculously good at finding 4 leaf clovers,
54. Always fixing something or improving something
55. Taking down gum trees with my bare hands and then shredding them to tiny pieces by hand.
56. Being a land surveyor, trust me with young people these days its weird!
57. Sitting for hours at a time thinking
58. Getting to church an hour early to pray and reflect and think so I can focus on thinking and not be late
59. Not having Facebook until recently,
60. looking people in the eye, got in a lot of trouble at school for looking teachers in the eye and females in the eye.
61. Really good sense of smell, eye sight and hearing
62. Saving people from cars
63. Spending time to help people who are lost
64. Helping a stranger move 3 cubic metres of soil!
65. Having birds pick things up for me
66. Having many family heirlooms
67. Liking my own space
68. Rejecting repeatedly the Girl that many guys wanted, But I found annoying
69. Being a virgin by choice
70. being a Pentecostal Christian
71. Renovating farms
72. Looking out for family
73. Walking away when people gossip
74. Having Muslim friends
75. Spending the time to form a friendship with a transgender person so that I may understand them
76. Advocating for social justice
77. giving up months and years of my life for others
78. extreme patience
79. Calming down a lamb that was distressed in my arms
80. Picking up rubbish
81. Always do a good job
82. Struggling not to finish things I start.
83. calming down strangers crying children
84. sleeping rough to empathise with others
85. Setting extreme challenges for myself each month
86. Learning martial art tricks
87. crushing cans with my hands
88. being really upset when someone objectifies a women's appearance!
89. Bush medicine phase
90. going out in the bush with lists of plants and finding all of them and applying them.
91. Shoe lace phase
92. Being asked to make a snow machine in 3 days and doing it
93. People assuming I know how to do something and I do but Being annoyed that they assumed it!
94. Learning to program
95. Planting sun flowers on the side of the road to bring joy to people
96. Driving to Random locations with my sister like a train station just so we can hang and talk.
97. Growing flowers to give to people
98. Knowing the Victorian love language of flowers
99. knowing how to track animals
100. Being almost physic at finding things!

I am really good friends with my neighbours but this is a list of the things that people have found weird and creepy about me!

I suspect just walking the mile to our shop is enough to make people think I`m a bit odd. It doesn`t take much longer than taking the car actually, given the single track road and navigating gates out of the drive. It`s also far less cruel to the car, which wouldn`t be anywhere near warmed up in that short journey.

Well shoot, I guess I can add some more to mine, I mean, look at Alex's list.

I'm a homesteader but I wear all black and have long purple hair.

I blast Icon For Hire, Fit For Rivals, Three Days Grace, Citizen Soldier, Eva Under Fire, Linkin Park, My Chemical Romance, and others of the same genre while doing woodworking. Currently listening to Iodine by Icon For Hire, and the next song on the playlist is Novocain by Fit For Rivals. I've written to Ariel and suggested that Icon and FFR play together, they're both indy bands and they've been extras in each-other's videos, so I think it could be done. Ariel thought it was a good idea, so maybe we'll get it as a treat in the future?

I often burst into a-capella song when something reminds me of the lyrics... It doesn't matter where I am or what I'm doing.

I am learning my 8th, 9th, and 10th languages: Old Norse, Nynorsk, and Northern Sami.

I'm friends in person with a former cage fighter who is a chef now, a lady who restores bikes, a professional folksinger, a retired journalist, and a guy that makes custom adult toys.

A Rock Band taught me to make Apple Crisp. Here's the link to my fave dessert:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUD6x3L_WSM

Yeah, music (on the urban homestead) definitely contributes to my neighbors' weird view of me. They are all pop-country folks (nothing wrong with that-- until they're all three sheets to the wind and have sung the same album at least twice, when it gets tiresome) whereas I'm all over the place depending on the weather.
It can be 90s Detroit techno, Tom Waits, Rage Against the Machine, Russian opera, early punk, classical, entire Bowie albums on repeat, Kraftwerk, old Enka songs (possibly the worst, when I sing along). Put it on, turn it up, and go do the chores and make the bread.


Reading all these, I sure wish I had permies for neighbors!! I'd definitely bring y'all banana bread.

What did you do to make your neighbors think you are crazy?

By just being me ...

Then I am sure my neighbors can't understand why someone would live where it is an hour long trip or more to buy gasoline and everything else.

And where a person never sees another person unless they live together or makes that long trip to buy stuff.

My neighbors are usually only here during hunting season.

Tereza Okava wrote:
Reading all these, I sure wish I had permies for neighbors!! I'd definitely bring y'all banana bread.

Yeah, that'd be great. There's someone in my therapy group that does Permaculture, and I think they're the only ones near me. They bought land that had been logged, and they put all the woody debris in an even layer among the stumps, then buldozed a bunch of dirt over it for a massive hugel field. They're planting a food forest on it. I only know them from group tho. Never been to see the thing. I was in and out of the hospital so much last year that I didn't get to see them often enough to become friends. Spent 3 months of last year total in the hospital spread over 6 times, so I missed out on a lot of stuff like grandma's birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, my birthday, etc...

I'm clearly lacking on the weirdness front. Even living in the city. But a lot of our neighbors don't do much of anything with their yards. Either leaving it for dirt or, like one neighbor, parking a travel trailer crosswise on the front lawn.

I covered the entire front yard with wood chips almost a foot deep and then planted berry bushes.
I did this with the 8 ft wide strip next to the driveway that most people park on.
I dug swales in the front yard but then buried them under wood chips.
The 4 truck loads of wood chips I got from the tree trimming company.
I dug infiltration basins under all the downspouts (away from the house a little ways) but they're also filled in with wood chips so you wouldn't know they were there unless you saw the construction.
All the other weird stuff is in back where no one sees it. The the single mom behind us is rarely out and now we have a privacy fence there anyway.
Planting weeds like plantain and thistles,
Butchering roadkill and burying the remains in the garden,
Having to keep track of the burial sites I don't plant root crops there for a year or so.
setting up ham radio antennas.
Cables running everywhere to solar panels.
The wood pile that runs most of the length of our side fence.

I guess I'd better up my game with the weirdness.
Daniel

Bear in mind, I live in a terraced suburban house with a tiny concreted yard, so a lot of what’s weird to my neighbours, wouldn’t necessarily be if I lived in the country.....

1) Having a jungle in my back yard, all in containers, including several fruit bushes and a couple of trees (I’m nothing if not ambitious!).

2) wandering outside in pjs at random times and walk round inspecting the plants, muttering to myself and occasionally talking to my iPod (I’m on YouTube).

3) recently I’ve developed an obsession with sweeping up leaves from outside not only mine, but also my neighbours houses. They might appreciate this, I don’t know, I’m just utilising the free carbon for my compost bin.

4) regularly wandering outside, peering into the compost bin, sighing, then walking away again (I’m sighing because it doesn’t seem to want to get hotter than 30 Celsius at mo).

5) They may be able to hear me singing songs through the walls where I make all the lyrics about my cat....

Heather Gardener wrote:Bear in mind, I live in a terraced suburban house with a tiny concreted yard, so a lot of what’s weird to my neighbours, wouldn’t necessarily be if I lived in the country.....

1) Having a jungle in my back yard, all in containers, including several fruit bushes and a couple of trees (I’m nothing if not ambitious!).

2) wandering outside in pjs at random times and walk round inspecting the plants, muttering to myself and occasionally talking to my iPod (I’m on YouTube).

3) recently I’ve developed an obsession with sweeping up leaves from outside not only mine, but also my neighbours houses. They might appreciate this, I don’t know, I’m just utilising the free carbon for my compost bin.

4) regularly wandering outside, peering into the compost bin, sighing, then walking away again (I’m sighing because it doesn’t seem to want to get hotter than 30 Celsius at mo).

5) They may be able to hear me singing songs through the walls where I make all the lyrics about my cat....

Ah yes, the crazy cat lady who sings. I have a song request, I want to hear the crazy cat lady edition of Damage by Fit For Rivals*. Make it funny, and about your obsessions with cats and gardening. And goooooooooooo!

* An American independent Rock Band based in Nashville, Tennessee. They are fronted by Renee Phoenix who has also released solo albums recently. They have Punk influences, and were Screamo in their early days, but are more general Rock now. They're friends with their fellow independent rock band Icon For Hire. Renee was in the IFH music video for the song Waste My Hate sporting the same look as in FFR's music video for the song Novocain.

Mow our grass rarely and when we do we don't rake it up!

1) importing weeds into my yard,

B) eating them

IV) gathering the neighbors' leaves

ii) asking for neighbor's organic grass cuttings

m) not having any grass of my own.

13) growing many unknown plants

XII) growing vegetables in the front yard

viv) Having a yard that looks like a jungle

89,000) burning a weird biochar oven in my driveway

What would really freak them out is the stuff they don't know about!

John S
PDX OR

In our case, I think it was the baby piglets in the kitchen.  They were born during near freezing weather and four died before we got to them.  Saved two!