I planted a bunch of vegetables for my mother along the fence in her back yard. 4 or 5 tomatoes, 2 peppers, and a zucchini. They were against an outside fence and I put a small fence around the other sides of them to separate them from the yard. It was about $30 worth of plants. It took some work to dig up that area and plant them. I’ve watered them every night for the past few weeks, except when it rained. There was time, money, and work invested in these plants. We were looking forward to fresh vegetables. They were healthy and growing and it should have been obvious to anyone that they weren’t weeds.
So I go over to my mother’s this evening and she tells me that Eric came by and did the lawn. I went out back and saw a nicely mowed lawn. He had also apparently taken a weed whacker and gone along the outside fences. He also went inside the fence around the vegetables and chopped down everything to ground level. For some reason, he left the one zucchini. maybe he realized what he had done in time to spare that one plant; probably the one we cared the least about.
He charges her $30 to mow the yard. She hadn’t paid him yet so I guess we’re about even. Well, that’s the cost of the plants. The time and work and the value of the results we expected aren’t really replacable. I’m not sure If there’s even time to replant this season or if I even want to do the work again.
I am really bummed out about this. I am goddam pissed! :mad:
You cannot imagine how pissed off I was when I saw this. I had to wait a while to calm down before I called him about it. He didn’t answer so I left a calm reasonable message explaining the situation.
As far as paying for them: he charges her $30 to mow the yard and weed the front brick walk. She hasn’t paid him yet, so we’re even on that.
I can understand this happening at 14. This guy is in his twenties or thirties.
I don’t know him well but he seems like an intelligent enough guy. He has a very responsible job and does this on the side. I think he’s just a city boy (like me) who knows how to run lawn mowers and weed whackers but maybe has never grown vegetables. I’m sure it was an honest mistake and I don’t want to make him feel bad and he’s not going to lose her business, but we’re all responsible for our mistakes.
That is a real disappointment for sure. I sympathize.
My neighbor’s landscapers once came around a wire fence separating our properties to use a leaf blower to blow leaves from the previous autumn out of the fence, and walked all over my emerging tulips, breaking all of the stalks with the new buds on them.
I saw him doing this, and went out to complain and he called his supervisor over and the supervisor tried to mollify me by saying “They’ll grow back.”
Yeah, maybe one out of ten will, a year later. Of course, I could still enjoy the trampled tulip leaves. Thanks for wasting all of my effort and six months of anticipation.
Something similar happened to us in our last place. Planted peonies, the condo gardening service whacked them. Next spring, same fucking thing. The next spring, we put a wire fence around them and they managed to bloom. They would also use the string trimmer around trees and chew the goddamn bark right off of them. More fences. Idiots.
Wait, 4-5 tomatoes, 2 peppers and a zucchini are $30.00 worth of plants?
Sounds expensive, unless you were buying 4 inch pots of tomatoes. Around here, a six pack of tomato seedlings is about $3.50.
But the season is still pretty young – just go to the garden center, buy a couple more six packs of veggies and fling them in the ground. They’ll do fine.
If it’s an honest mistake, and you say it was, then I think you just have to bite the bullet on this one. Make sure he knows what happened and that you’re disappointed, what you want protected and where and just move forward now fixing what you can and writing the rest off to educating him and plain ol’ bad luck. But do pay him, he performed a service with good intentions and should not be penalized for that.
Now, if it ever happens again give him a haircut with his weed wacker.
Even if it was an honest mistake, he needs to learn his lesson and pay restitution. Otherwise, the lesson won’t stick. I say call it even with the $30.
They were around $4 a piece. So 8 plants would be $32 dollars. These weren’t little plants. I wanted to purchase something that was well started. They were heirloom tomatoes which I imagine cost a little more.
Sorry to hear of your veggie loss. One of my sons destroyed about a dozen of mine while not paing attention driving the riding mower. Pissed me off, too, of course.
IF you decide to get more, there’s a thing lots of folks don’t realize when putting 'maters in-ground (and my apologies if you already know this…) - plant it so that there is a fair bit of trunk under the soil level, even deep enough to cover lower leaves if need be. It makes for faster/stronger growth as the trunk sprouts roots, making plant more wind-resistant, dry-soil tolerant, and stronger trunk holds weight of heavytomatoes much better. Here’s a link describing such if needed. Also, IMHO, its not too late to replant tomatoes and expect good results in a timely manner.
A few years ago, I received a City citation, warning me about my “tall, invasive weeds.” After examining my yard and finding no such weeds, I can only conclude that the inspector was referring to my asparagus patch.
A couple of years back, I lived in a rental place where we had a back garden, which the flat I lived in had exclusive access to. The landlord sent these utterly useless bastards to replace a fence section that had collapsed, and repaint the back fence.
They started by chopping my rosemary bush right down to the ground, and putting scaffolding posts on top of my herb patch. When I complained that, while I understood that the posts needed to go where they needed to go, they really should have given me a chance to move plants out of the way, they insisted it was fine “It’ll grow back” yeah, sure, a 3 foot high plant when chopped to the ground then put under scaffolding posts for over a month will just be back to how it was in weeks!
Then it was too wet to do the painting, so they started entertaining themselves by digging up plants- initially possibly to improve access to the fence, but then they just started just chopping down and digging out random stuff, including a geranium plant in full bloom, that was nowhere near either the back fence or fence. At which point I came home.
“What the hell are you guys doing killing my plants?!!!”
“Oh, did you want this?”
“That’s a plant I planted. My mother gave me that.”
“Well, how am I supposed to know you wanted it? Looks like a weed to me”
“It’s covered in bright purple flowers! Of course it’s not a sodding weed!”
“Weeds can have flowers. I’m not a gardener, how am I supposed to know?”
“Then why the fuck are you digging up my back garden when no-one asked you to do it? You are intentionally damaging my property, without either my permission or any reason!”
“Well, it looks a mess to me; there’s all these plants everywhere. You should be thanking me for trying to sort it out for you really.”
Honestly, he was lucky there was a group of four of them, because that spade was looking damn tempting at that point. They’d even crushed the plants in pots on the patio, rather than just move them out the way.
I still get properly angry just thinking about these guys; we couldn’t even get rid of them, as the landlord hired them and refused to listen to any complaints. They did a total botch of the actual work, too.
We had a large shaded area in the back yard. Like 30 by 50 feet at the base of a large tree. Grass just wasn’t working there. I had made a nice perimeter with masonry and totally de weeded and tilled the area. She wanted a bunch of flowers there so I got a bunch of packets of seeds of various flowers that would do well in shade.
Awhile later in the season stuff was sprouting up every where. I had to go away for a week and she asked if she could do anything. I noted that some weeds were starting to come back in the flower garden. I specifically told her that MOST of what was sprouting was not weeds. I also showed her what the 3 or 4 weed types we had looked like (not that she didn’t know having spent many hours herself weeding the lawn). It didn’t take a PHD botanist to tell the difference. I EVEN said if you are not sure, don’t pull it.
Come back a week later and she had pulled EVERY fracking green thing that sprung up.
Then, later she bitched like hell because of the lack of flowers.
I am goddam pissed! :mad: