A friend actually did what you suggest, but he used heavy cardboard over the grass. He placed the cardboard -- actually a double layer of cardboard -- on the grass. He then placed the seed potatoes on the cardboard and covered them with about 10 to 12 inches of straw. The potatoes vines came up right out of the straw; and he lifted the potatoes out of the straw at harvest. It seems to me that if you actually did a bit more layering it might work even better: cardboard, then peat moss or compost, then grass clippings or chopped dried leaves, then another layer of compost, then a sprinkle of bonemeal and rock phosphate to up the phosphorus and potassium for strong root growth, and an inch or two of topsoil on top in which to set the seed potatoes. The potato root action this season should help finish preparing the bed underneath for next year. Here is a link that might be useful: HarvestToTable.com

Oh dear, Woori, I really feel for you. I lived next door to the "neighbour from hell" for years. The main bones of contention were (a) our refusal to let her dog "play" in our yard (its idea of playing was to chase our cat and try and kill it - she thought the answer was for us to get rid of our cat) and the temerity of us to try and grow shrubs in an attempt to screen her view from her high set kitchen window - looked straight onto the side of the house where our main entrance was located. It wasn't so much that she could see everything/everyone, but she started abusing our friends, as well our young children. After considerable pruning/hacking on her part (unfortunately you seem to need witnesses for a successful action for trespass/malicious damage), we put up a timber screen - which she tried to demolish as we were building it. She also used to throw things over the fence - her garden prunings, rubbish off the street, etc. My daughter, who was about 6 or 7 at the time, was having a picnic lunch in the garden with her girlfriend and madam threw a beer bottle over the fence which hit the friend on the head!! Luckily, no damage to head but it could have been very nasty. After many years of putting up with her, I came home one day to find a huge mass of prunings thrown over the fence at the front of the garden. I was so peeed off!! Went to trusty printer and printed up a very clear sign which said "Mrs Wright throws her rubbish into my garden", fixed it to a garden stake and hammered it into the front lawn in the midst of the mess. I got a letter from her solicitor threatening me with defamation (he should have been threatening libel - some solicitor) if I didn't remove the sign. On the Chamber of Magistrate's advice, I wrote to the solicitor telling him I would remove the sign if madam desisted from "the following actions", which comprised a list three pages long. The sign stayed there until it more or less fell to pieces, along with the rubbish (now that took determination). We finally decided to sell the house and move on. I now have two rental units next to me and have had partying young people, couples with major domestic problems, a couple of leases to drug addicts, and one lot of very noisy and messy petrol heads. But compared with madam, truly wonderful neighbours. Re the Chamber Magistrate - in NSW a solicitor (who has a chamber in the courthouse??) employed by the courts to offer legal advice but does not actually take on cases. There is no charge for the service. I guess there is a Victorian equivalent. After tearing my hair out with police, council officers, paying solicitors to write letters, etc., I found the Chamber Magistrate very helpful and sympathetic.

Well, perhaps me being suspect of lawn crews. Here's my thoughts; When dethatching your lawn would have left very little of the debris you mentioned on the lawn, particularly twigs. But, depends on what you call twigs, vs. my version of twigs right? Dethatching is deep raking process. If done by machine, the small branches and pine cones would be broken up more than what you saw before they did it. If they did it with a tow behind, you would seen a good deal of it piled by the mower turn areas, because the tines would generally push the twigs rather than shred, then sweep it out in the process of the turn. In general, you should see a marked thinness of the turf as compared to before. This would be immediate after the tines hit and it's raked.

Jane, it sounds like you and your neighborhood were horrendously and directly affected by the Vietnam war years. It must have been terrible. There were many problems with the administration of the draft and one of the biggest was that practices varied greatly from one Selective Service board to another (there were hundreds of them or more in the US). To resolve that problem, toward the latter years of the war, the law was changed and the birthday lottery system was put in place as a system directed nationally. The lottery assigned randomly drawn numbers to calendar days of the year and draftees were called based upon the number assigned to their birthday in order. A loose explanation of how it worked - if a young man's birthday was June 5 and the number assigned in the lottery for his birth year was 120, people with birthdays numbered 1-119 would be called first and then it would be the turn of the fellow with a June 5th birthday. For the lottery years, I don't think they ever got past or much past 180 so that those whose birthdays had higher numbers were never called up. In my area, it was rare for a young man to be drafted right at or soon after finishing at high school because of how the system worked overall. Registration into the Selective Service System was required by one's 18th birthday and it took awhile, often a year or more, for them to get to and digest new registrations to process for the draft call. Not everyone attained age 18 before graduating high school (I was 17 myself) and even if so, one could get a student deferment that could be extended for the next year (or initiated) by being enrolled in a college of any kind. Community colleges counted as well as 4 year ones, the only requirement was to be taking enough classes for the particular school to consider the young man as a full time student. I myself drew a very low number but I had a student deferment at that point. Most of the guys I knew who were drafted were 20 or older, often from blue collar families (why, I don't know) and not pursuing college studies. When I was at Army boot camp, my basic training company was a mix of those who'd joined the National Guard, those who had enlisted, draftees and Army Reserve volunteers like me. The draftees were as I described just before. While there were wait lists, it wasn't that hard to join the National Guard or the (even safer) Reserves to be sure to avoid the personal jeopardy of combat. I joined just as an insurance policy in case the rules changed and or my student deferment was lost and or it ended at graduation. There were many other ways to avoid the draft without leaving the country and frankly my experience was that those who wound up getting drafted had been lazy or inattentive about taking available steps to protect themselves. Because of deferments, the numbers needed, etc., I don't think the draft "take" was ever greater than 1/3 of the eligible individuals of any birth age group. I served my 6 years quietly as a reservist with monthly "meetings" and two weeks of annual "summer camp". I had the equivalent of a professional white collar Army job in my reserve unit - no going out on maneuvers, no combat boots, no out marching in the dirt, no overnights other than summer camp and monthly meetings were 8-5 down the road from where I lived. . By the time I was discharged, the draft and the war had both ended but my personal safety had been ensured. It served its purpose for me. For your neighborhood to have seemingly born such a disproportionate share of the load was most unfortunate. War is horrible and unfortunately as a nation, all these years and military fiascos later, we still haven't learned that we are not the world's police force and that the money spent and lives wasted in distant lands does nothing for our own safety or freedom and can be argued to have the opposite effect.