We live in a nice appealing neighborhood. Items which have gone missing, never to appear again:
Neighbors’ Christmas lights, taken off the bushes
Neighbors’ garden statues
Our pumpkins … after I wrestled the huge one from the store and onto the front step.
Fresh basil bushes, pulled out of the ground
We used to have a Baskin Robbins store. They posted a picture, taken from their security camera, of a man shown with two ice cream birthday cakes which he walked out with sans payment. Happy Birthday!
My apartment complex tilled up a bunch of plots along a fence line, topped them with some nice soil, and let people rent them for the season. The first year or two every plot was rented out and you’d see people hard at work tending their little section. But theft was so rampant that now they just sit empty. Stealing anything is bad enough, but watching your neighbors work hard for something over the course of months and then stealing it away seems damn near sociopathic.
You people must live in the wrong places. Every year I get lots of veggies and fruit from my neighbor’s gardens. And I don’t even have to bother to steal the items.
They gladly bring the stuff over to me. Good soil, bountiful crops and (me) one grateful neighbor.
There must be some large segment of the population that thinks stealing food isn’t really stealing. These are the same people who steal people’s food at the workplace or when they hear about it just shrug it off with a “it’s just food”.
One of my first jobs I had was at a grocery store. I remember a store meeting where the manager mentioned that more food than usual was missing during his routine counts and that employees need to cut back on what they were taking.:eek: Not “if you get caught I will fire you” but rather “please take less than you usually take”.
I used to have an allotment, but gave it up because every year, one entire kind of crop would disappear from each plot - all 20 pounds of my gooseberries, five whole rows of potatoes from the neighbouring plot, all of the onions from the next, etc. Stealing to sell, I think.
This may be the most puzzling post I’ve ever read. We have a loquat tree in our backyard, and it’s currently my leading candidate for worst, most pointless fruit on earth. It’s 85% pit, 10% tough, unpleasant skin, and 5% fruit. Which is fine, I guess, but not at all worth the effort to get at.
Our dogs seem to enjoy them, though, judging by all the pits in their poop. Which sometimes appears on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night during loquat season. :mad:
I live in a “nice” neighborhood, and I see people stealing flowers all the time. The peach colored roses across the street seem to be a favorite target for young men walking home form the bus stop. They usually only take one, so I’m guessing it’s a “sorry I’m late” gift for their girlfriends.
I’d love to get rid of the evil-spider supporting bushes along the sidewalk in my front yard, but knowing the probability of anything pretty getting stolen, I can’t bring myself to make the change.
A couple years back we actually caught a guy stealing from our garden. We knew him, it was someone my SO had worked with so he had been offered some of our harvest but that apparently wasn’t enough.
However, I grew tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers beside my house this year, and my neighbors (I live next to an apartment building) were all very polite. No one took anything without permission, and I freely shared everything I grew. So not all neighbors are grabby.
No. So you’d have to do it without warning signs and hope you don’t get tracked
I’ll confess I’ve once or twice nicked the odd bit of fruit that was overhanging the path, on a bush with overripe/rotten fruit on it. I can’t see anyone reasonable complaining. Windfalls outside of a property it’s legal to take here.
I must admit though, I felt pretty tempted at my allotments to do a proper theft job with one guy- he had an entire half plot full of beans, and has just left the whole lot to rot on the plants. I swear he’s not picked a bean… Even if he’s planning to save seed, there’s no way in hell he’s planning to dry that many. I didn’t do it, but it’s such a waste…
I was at a specialty food store once that carried a large variety of hot sauces. They also carried basically pure capsascin. So, take that or one of those hotter than hell just to be hotter than hell hot sauces, dilute with a little water, and spray some on your peppers, The culprit will most likely not wash their hands thoroughly and soon or later get some residue where they don’t want it.
If you want a DIY hotter than hell liquid just go buy a bunch of habaneros (our walmart carries em). Put em in a blender and chop em up. Add a bit of vinegar to make it a slurry. Let it sit for about a week so the vinegar can leach out the hot shit from the pepper parts. Then drain off the liquid for your spray. Use the pulp to make some killer salsa. When doing all this treat it like you are working with nuclear waste lest you “hot” yourself.
Just remember to pick your coated peppers with rubber gloves and wash em thoroughly…
I wish someone would steal loquats from our trees during the season. The “season” lasts for about 5 days and there are just too many to eat. I wish I knew something to do with them.
So you’d have to do it without warning signs and hope you don’t get tracked 