Ink & Penstemon

When my new fence went in, I extended it along the property line to give me a bit of a bump out into my front side yard. It’s pretty sunny up there, so, hey, let’s put in a few tomato plants and cukes! Now, I’ve been very careful with the watering regimen for the tomatoes as, if they get too much water, they can turn mealy and won’t be as flavorful. So imagine my chagrin when I came out one evening to discover my neighbor had placed an overhead sprinkler on his side of his property, set at full bore, sending a load of overspray over the fence and onto the garden. Normally, a little water wouldn’t be a problem, but he left this running for about an hour and a half, leaving the garden waterlogged.

This is the ongoing problem with this neighbor. He will not water an area on his property until it appears to be dying. And when he puts his hose out, he forgets about it for hours, leaving swamped soils and gallons of runoff pouring into the street. Consequently, his lawn dies back a bit and gets filled up with weeds, and not the good kind like clover. The weeds stay greener longer than the lawn, but then I get assaulted with an ongoing weed battle.

I do self-serving gestures of neighborliness, like weeding on his side of the fence and putting in dryland plants between our properties. But, the dryland plants have a hard time with the inattention and lack of weeding, followed by 15 inches of water laid down all at once.

Still, he’s a friendly, quiet neighbor. So it could be worse.

In short, mealy tomatoes aren’t the end of the world.