Stick a fork in it. I'm done.
Went out back this afternoon and saw that the wildflower / sunflower garden I had put down seed on our side of the property line in the field had been completely mowed down by the guy who hays our neighbor's field.
We have done two surveys and retained an attorney for a total cost of $4K. They just mowed down the survey stakes but the attorney seemed to make an impression and we had a few years of peace. This year I wanted to make that area a pollinator area for my vegetable garden strips. It takes about two years for the wildflowers to bloom and really take and they just mowed it all down.
I have been tactful to this point, confining my gripes to the people involved. The guy who actually does the work runs away whenever I try to talk to him so I've focused on the people who hire him. Then there's the boarding school on the other side who uses the same guy for their fields and allows him access to my property out back.
The people who hire him are out of town so I went over to the barn that the school owns and let loose. I told the woman who runs the barn the entire history of the offenses going back 14 years. She said she didn't have any control over it so I demanded the phone number of the guy doing the work which she had in her cell phone.
The guy's son answered. I talked to him before years ago when he was maybe 20. Now he's an adult and involved in the business and needs to get this situation under control. I just ripped him a new one. He wanted to tell me that it wasn't intentional. I shot back with the fact that this has been going on for 14 years and my mother in law told me she never had a deal with them. My signs are stolen. Trees have been ripped out. A chicken coop was vandalized. The neighbor who hires him has been mowing a wide path on the property line. There's no ambiguity here on the property line. I repeated things like, "Why do you keep doing this?" and "What are you getting out of this?" He's sending me $40 for the seed and said I should call him any time.
Hung up the phone and my husband said, "He's emotionally traumatized now so he'll be dealing with that." I just said, "He has a choice. He can deal with his father or he can hear from me." My husband said, "I think you have a pretty good shot." Then my husband told me that my mother in law looked after him and his sister when their house burned down when they were kids. Good thing I didn't have that little tidbit of information during the phone call. Ungrateful idiots.
