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

Setting the alarm for sunrise, in winter, to put out warm hummingbird feeder. Feeding organic walnuts to squirrels.  

Vacuum the pine cones out of the yard, prior to mowing, and the leaves from the flower garden, before winter sets in, using my shop vac and a cyclone pre-filter.

Me, to neighbor who just moved in next door: "Hey, can I have those cardboard boxes you're recycling? (With excited grin)"
Neighbor: "Aw, you don't want these. I left them out in the rain, they're ruined."
Me (now with BIGGER grin): "I'll take 'em all!"

Sheet mulching layer for my front yard. Perfect timing, too! And I missed the chance/was too lazy to scavenge from the bins on collection day.

The biggest pain is removing all that tape!

At this moment I live in the city in an area that has neat manicured lawns. It drives my enighbours crazy that we put off mowing the grass for as long as possible ...and then do not rake up the cuttings.

We let the yard grow. I've harvested dewberries out of it, and have let the backyard go to the chickens. It's now pretty covered over with mulberry trees and goldenrod. Native asters, too. We have native grasses growing that blew in from somewhere, and I let them do their Tall Grass Prairie thing. Wheat has gone wild and replaced part of what the builder scattered years ago, and we have sections that are white or yellow clover seasonally, or some odd grass that has been stubborn enough to survive total neglect, chickens, and goose grazing. I have scattered fenugreek around the backyard and have great huge clumps of it that the chickens eat from time to time, and that provide a spot for other things to grow.

My neighbor needs to think, have "alone time", and get out of his house every so often but his youngest son likes to drive their yard tractor and keeps their backyard closely mowed, so he (Neighbor) mows part of my front yard with his tractor. Slowly. He covers most of the front on his side, the drainage ditch on that side, and the side yard. He carefully avoids the pretty tea rose up front and the sprawling swamp rose in the back.
He doesn't understand why we don't want a nice lawn. Or pretty gardens.
He has a nice yard he's completely fenced off and filled with the cars of his family - multi-generational household. Sometimes they have parties and have a bouncy house and grill out. (We don't get invited. lol)

I told him that my trees help with the heat and feed the chickens. I use the grass part of the yard to feed the geese, and rake up what I can of the softer old growth to provide bedding where it's needed. We agree that wild rodents should stay in the fields and he would prefer it if I did more to keep the grass down between us, but if I let him mow and don't fuss about his goats he'll do that part until I get around to it.

I go out with a garden fork in the Spring and Early Summer rains and poke holes where Neighbor drives the tractor so I get better water penetration from the compacted soil. Our yard soaks up the rain like the sponge it is, while his yard runs water off in sheets.
My geese enjoy wandering over into the side yard to watch his chickens and yell at his dogs.

They think I'm a crazy woman and my husband is an overworked guy with a weird wife. I think I'll be giving them an "extra" rooster soon. We have lovely conversations, very infrequently, over the fence.

Brody Ekberg wrote:

S Ydok wrote:

Carla Burke wrote:

T Simpson wrote:

greg mosser wrote:probably when i erected a crow-feeding platform that i stock with mice we caught in the house.

That's pretty weird dude..

Yup! But, this is a fantastic idea! Crows are not interested in eating your poultry, but are a deterrent to raptors, which are VERY interested in eating domestic poultry. It's a means of attracting LGBs! (Livestock Guardian Birds!)

This sounds interesting!

I see people struggling with predator birds around their chickens all the time on Facebook and nobody has ever brought up attracting crows. I think it’s a great idea, although they definitely could get annoying with all their noise. Definitely will keep the idea in mind though!

Don’t crows go after chicks?

Vanessa Smoak wrote:Don’t crows go after chicks?

So far, our hens have been very protective of the chicks, and we've not lost one to any predator - even the black snakes that occasionally get into the coop and steal eggs, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't.

I told them that I don’t have a TV or wifi. CRAZY!

Austin Durant wrote:Me, to neighbor who just moved in next door: "Hey, can I have those cardboard boxes you're recycling? (With excited grin)"
Neighbor: "Aw, you don't want these. I left them out in the rain, they're ruined."
Me (now with BIGGER grin): "I'll take 'em all!"

Sheet mulching layer for my front yard. Perfect timing, too! And I missed the chance/was too lazy to scavenge from the bins on collection day.

The biggest pain is removing all that tape!

I can relate. Neighbors that do a LOT of online shopping generate lots of cardboard for me to pilfer from their recycling cans.

Probably when my three year old self ended up in a rural emergency room after the barn cat tried to take out my trachea.

I was out at the well pump in the dusk with my hippie-freegan-but-urban parents who were visiting their hippie off grid farmer friends in Loachapoka Alabama. We were getting water, maybe for my bath in a tin tub in the middle of the living room. The grown ups took showers from some kind of bag rigged up above them. Cold of course. It was the 70's. I had probably already hit the outhouse for the night. I was convinced that there were bears in the outhouse after dark t so no way was I using those facilities after nightfall.

Anyway, the well and pump were behind the garden and we were all out there in the evening cool. The grown ups were chatting and I was wandering around looking at things. I saw a big black cat walking in the garden and thought "oh, a kitty cat that I should pat!" and started toward it. My mom said "Merce! Stop!" and the next thing I knew I was on my back with a cat on top of me biting into my throat.

The next think I remember was a lot of hollering about whose car to take me to the hospital in and arguing about where to go. I don't remember crying myself but I was bleeding from the throat copiously and can imagine that that freaked them all out pretty badly. After that was some kind of rural hospital with the last light streaming in through the windows and a bald doctor with twinkly glasses and a white coat leaning over me. I got stitched up. There is still a scar in the soft part of my throat. They put the cat down after finding that it didn't have rabies.

I was three and I thought all of the grown ups there were crazy. The doctor probably did too. Cannot imagine what the neighbors thought.

I weed the weeds.

Along our quiet street there is a three acre, permanently empty plot and stretches of green that are public land.  The plots have lamb's quarters, garlic mustard, woodland lettuce, curly dock, bitter dock,  purple deadnettle, wild garlic, chicory, narrow leaf and broadleaf plaintain, chickweed, sorrel,  and clover.  In other words, Fast food!  Free vegetables! Unfortunately, the mugwort is trying to move in and take over.  

I can't have a barely useful, superspreader, invasive weed overcome my delicious, nutritious weeds!  So, my neighbors  watch as I weed among the weeds, tearing out only the mugwort, especially after a soaking rain when it's easier.  

One day as I was gathering some greens and pulling mugwort, our wonderful, funny, busybody neighbor Chris  goodnaturedly asked me,
"What the hell are you doing?"
I explained.  
Dire warnings about being poisoned, wildlife peeing on my food, etc., followed by the inevitable "You're crazy!".  
I think he loves it.

I do sometimes wonder if my neighbours think I'm crazy, as I:


1. Pick dandelion heads and put them in a basket.

2. Pick stinging nettles with my bare hands and put them in a bowl.

3. Pile up logs and branches all over the yard, and cover them with dirt.

4. Walk around my yard looking for fiddleheads and taking off the heads.

5. Tell my dog to "be nice to the plants!"

6. Wander the yard looking for sticks for trellises.

Susan Mené wrote:I weed the weeds.

Along our quiet street there is a three acre, permanently empty plot and stretches of green that are public land.  The plots have lamb's quarters, garlic mustard, woodland lettuce, curly dock, bitter dock,  purple deadnettle, wild garlic, chicory, narrow leaf and broadleaf plaintain, chickweed, sorrel,  and clover.  In other words, Fast food!  Free vegetables! Unfortunately, the mugwort is trying to move in and take over.  

I can't have a barely useful, superspreader, invasive weed overcome my delicious, nutritious weeds!  So, my neighbors  watch as I weed among the weeds, tearing out only the mugwort, especially after a soaking rain when it's easier.  

One day as I was gathering some greens and pulling mugwort, our wonderful, funny, busybody neighbor Chris  goodnaturedly asked me,
"What the hell are you doing?"
I explained.  
Dire warnings about being poisoned, wildlife peeing on my food, etc., followed by the inevitable "You're crazy!".  
I think he loves it.

Mugwort is a wonderful medicinal. It helps promote relaxation and good sleep, as well as being able to remember dreams, better, if you want.

Susan Mené wrote:One day as I was gathering some greens and pulling mugwort, our wonderful, funny, busybody neighbor Chris  goodnaturedly asked me,
"What the hell are you doing?"
I explained.  
Dire warnings about being poisoned, wildlife peeing on my food, etc., followed by the inevitable "You're crazy!".  

And what does he think happens in commercial fields of green stuff?
This reminds me of the people who tell me that they prefer to eat out "because the food is cleaner". They have never worked fast food or in a commercial kitchen.

in't that the truth.

Well, not my neighbors but my husband.  After laughing till the tears ran down my face, I tried to explain what was so funny about THIS comment:

Dc Stewart wrote:If you've been really good, Santa will urinate on the biochar so that it's already inoculated.

from this thread:

https://permies.com/t/218487/casual-thought#1852990

I do a lot of stuff some folks would find crazy so as to avoid judgemental stares and the unwanted opinions of others I bought land where I have no neighbors. There is not a soul within eyes shot of my homestead. Only deer and bear. wolves, coyotes, etc and they are never judgy. I can do as I please and only I can see and hear it.

I was once house sitting for a friend with a miniature agroforestry system.  It was in a more mesic environment that didn't get so much rain.  He was on rain water catchment.  

Sure enough while i was there it started to rain, and it was enough to overflow the catchment tank. So i decided to go out side into the rain, turn on the water hose, and strategically spread the water out into the landscape, rather than letting it all go into one spot to drain away.  

The neighbors probably thought the hamster running the wheel in my head died.  "What is he doing watering in the rain?"

Went exploring with my dog.  Found a sump (water recharge basin) that had a new "entrance" cut into the wire fencing.  Aways wanted to go in there, so I did.  An hour later, my across-the-street neighbor met me walking home.  

oh dear. i also never see my neighbors until.... i have a machete in my hand, horsefly bites bleeding down my face, manure splattered everywhere, or some other ridiculous situation. I know they think i'm nuts.... with lots of justification.

Too bad about the shirt though!!! (anything fun inside the sump area, besides all the DNA evidence you left?)

Soon after we moved here, there was flooding, I took a mattock and chopped out channels to put the water where I wanted it. The water was flowing, so I could see how to channel it easily, but that meant every stroke of the mattock splashed mud all over me.
A truck pulled in "Hi! I'm your neighbor down the road!!" "Hi! I'm a muddy mess!!"
Lovely way to meet the neighbors....
:D

I put my greenhouse in the front yard, and butcher animals in the backyard. I live in a small rural city.

My neighbors are amused by the whole thing.

Yelling at them. We value our privacy and bought a 4 acre lot tucked waay back at the end of the street in "town", by town I mean a small village on the edge of a state park. What we didn't know is that there's been a concerted effort by the neighbors from a more cluttered part of the town to declare our private road and utility easement along our creek as public property, so a number of them started a campaign to use it as walking path.  Again, we're private people, and I also get up to weird and maybe not the most legal stuff, like making charcoal, and I don't want people wandering through our property.

I put up signs and turned away anybody who came on without business.  I mean anybody, old men and women, groups of middle aged ladies, local utility company people checking on things in their casual clothes with their personal vehicles.  One of the signs from previous owners that I left up says, "Beware of dog", we don't have a dog, I joke that I am the dog. After about 2 years, they finally gave up and stopped coming.  Now we're the crazy anti-social people at the end of the road who get up to who-knows-what. Technically, that's true. lol

My elderly neighbor saw me picking aronia berries in my food forest and asked if I was picking blueberries.  I told him what they were and gave him a handful to try.  He spit them out really fast, turned tail and muttered his way back to his porch.  I get gallons of them and love them for jelly and wine but I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm crazy.

I have been piecemealing a wooden 'retention' wall on the side of my property where I am trying to reverse years of erosion by adding biomass behind the wall and essentially making a hugel at the base of a small five foot decline.

Tree trunks, branches, shrub pruning all go towards it. It isn't a mess but it is sizable.

Nobody has said anything to me so far, but I have had 'donations' appear next to property of branches/tree trunks. Nothing crazy, but someone has noticed!

Estimated water usage before we moved to the country.  Installed water tanks for double that amount.  We are known as "the tank farm"
Needless to say, we have water when others are organising tanker deliveries.  Ha! not so silly now.     It is looking a bit iffy since there has been half the "normal" rainfall over the past 12 months.

First rain in a week, it's pouring down out here! Um... Yes, I ran out to dance in the rain!

    I foraged weed grass and planted it in my yard.
    Climate changes, complete removal of trees as people build new homes, and a neighbor who decided to not-so-clandestinely drain his excess water onto my property caused the mudbath in the picture below.
     My home and land is part developing food forest (for me) and part suburban backyard (for my husband).  My part is much bigger!  Anyway, neither of us need a perfectly coiffed green lawn, nor am I a neat freak.  However, my shepherd must run and the amount of dirt/mud coming into my home on any given day was making my floors crunchy.  My husband had his way and put down sod.  It died within 2 weeks resulting in the mudbath.
     The first thing I learned as a permie (and, incidentally, my most important skill as a nurse) was OBSERVE.  So I did just that, and what I saw was patches of "weed" grass popping up in damp woodlands, dry, rocky sandy areas, etc.  These weeds were thriving where they most things would die.
      So I foraged from  roadsides, parking lots, cracks in cement, trails, the crack between the curb and asphalt, etc. , and bit by bit transplanted the weeds into my muddy area and family, friends, and neighbors would give me that look that says "now she's getting really crazy;  it's starting to get annoying.
      Now they're just impressed.

And, if you noticed, it is the same half-deflated ball in my yard one year later, hahahaha!

I've asked my neighbor to save the unwanted cardboard boxes for me, also I ask for all her kitchen scraps (I provide the bucket).  

It could maybe be the two hand carved, in a spiral pattern RUNE posts on each side of my driveway.

I refuse to shave and have somewhat long hair. ( at least in the back, in front I now have a very large forehead )

I wear what I feel most comfortable in and don't care about condition, color or patterns.

I don't own a TV or often hear any so-called news.

I'm not sure if this applies to Permies, but I'm always armed.

Thinking about this, I don't really feel that my neighbors think I'm all that crazy (I only speak to a couple of them and I'm OK with that)


Peace

PS, I have also been known to take a "pee" on the compost piles from time to time.

I have also applied said liquid on some of my flowers to add a little extra flavor for Bambi and friends to feed on!!! (doesn't work all that great)


Peace

I’m positively tame, I think. My neighbors don’t really care what I do but my church crowd thinks I might just have lost my mind because I got a milk cow and learned to make cheese.

I must not be to bad a neighbor because when I am working in my lower garden that is about 150 feet from the road, many of them honk when they drive by and I wave.

My neighbors wave at me too :D
Early on I had something weird I was doing, a guy who had waved before but I hadn't met stopped "I always see you working out here by yourself but this looks worse than usual!" he looked at me very concernedly "are you in trouble this time, honey?"  
Uhh no sir, actually I'm not, just got some seriously alien physics going on, but thank you for being concerned!
I was unloading big things out of the truck with the tractor, I had slung stuff under it to get it out with when I was loading it, so all I was doing was hooking up the sling stuff and lifting it out with the tractor enough to slide it down the ramp so I could reposition the tractor to move it again. But OOOH it looked bad.... It actually was more under control than a LOT of things I have done!

Actually, they are the crazy people. If you allow certain things on your property long enough, there may come a time you cannot, under the laws of men, be able to stop them.  Then you have to learn to compost, but you can only compost so much, and the other invasive species types start noticing something is amiss.   ;)

Juan Montes wrote:Yelling at them. We value our privacy and bought a 4 acre lot tucked waay back at the end of the street in "town", by town I mean a small village on the edge of a state park. What we didn't know is that there's been a concerted effort by the neighbors from a more cluttered part of the town to declare our private road and utility easement along our creek as public property, so a number of them started a campaign to use it as walking path.  Again, we're private people, and I also get up to weird and maybe not the most legal stuff, like making charcoal, and I don't want people wandering through our property.

I put up signs and turned away anybody who came on without business.  I mean anybody, old men and women, groups of middle aged ladies, local utility company people checking on things in their casual clothes with their personal vehicles.  One of the signs from previous owners that I left up says, "Beware of dog", we don't have a dog, I joke that I am the dog. After about 2 years, they finally gave up and stopped coming.  Now we're the crazy anti-social people at the end of the road who get up to who-knows-what. Technically, that's true. lol

A story of weirding out the neighborhood, from long ago and far away...
I had skunks on the property. Normally I have zero problems with them and get along fine with them. Some got under a trailer that a family member was living in and got territorial, and the smell of skunk was getting out of hand.

So I took a big dog carrier, slid a black plastic garbage bag over it, put cat food in it, and left the door open. Came out about 3:30 AM, carefully eased the door shut, carefully tied the bag shut, with zero drama from anything in there, and, not being a fool, tied it to the roof of my car instead of putting it inside.

Was taking them to a better place they could live, oops, need gas. The gas station on the corner where I always stopped knew me. The clerk was bored "what are you up to at 4AM?" "I'm deporting some skunks to down by the river."  "You are not! I'm going to go look!" He went out, untied the bag, a skunk pounced at him (they do that to threaten) He screamed hysterically "there are SKUNKS in there!!" Uh, yeah, I told you that....

Skunks got taken and carefully released and looked happy (I had 8 of them, I hadn't looked at all before I tied the bag, wanted to keep them calm.) I went home.

My dad came by about 10AM.  "I stopped for gas about 7 and Shawn said you were deporting skunks at 4AM" "yeah, I got 8 of them. "  "Good! He also told me how he was sure you had skunks on the roof. Twit!"  

I always just treated the skunks like cats and had no problems with them. The family member in the trailer sat down on the step of the porch one day, looked over, a big skunk was snoozing there too. She started to move, the skunk woke up, stood up, looking alarmed. She sat back down, he sat back down. She tried to stand up several times, he kept freaking out. She told me later "Your skunk made me sit with him for an hour!!"  "oh sorry, just say something like 'I need to go in now' and he'll get up and leave. He likes to be social but talking to him makes him leave."

I like skunks, it's not a normal thing, I guess :D

When John and I were still living in that tiny apartment, years ago, and he still smoked, he would go outside and sit on the back steps, to get his fix. One evening, a young skunk saw him sitting there, and came up to inspect. It apparently deemed him safe, because he stayed calm, and chatted to him in a gentle voice. The two struck up a friendship, of sorts, and would meet out on those back steps every evening. Even after John quit smoking, he'd go out to visit and chat with his little buddy, almost every evening, until we moved, a couple years later. It was one of the best clues I had, that he could be turned from straight-up city boy to permie. And, yes - the neighbors thought he was crazy.

Having 60 cubic yards of wood chips delivered to my 1/4 acre city lot and then spreading it out 16" deep around my 8 fruit trees and 60 blueberry bushes on both sides of my house (doing Back to Eden).  I was at a neighbor's wedding and another neighbor asked me, "So what's with all the wood chips?"