Hum, Two choices but not sure which will win.

1-carpeting the lawn with cardboard.

2-picking through (what would look like a pile of dirt to them) worm poop to separate the worms and cocoons from the castings.

I did the punkin smashing on the driveway and the kids were doing it too. I made sure to clean up carefully cuz the neighbors would call the village to complain.

Ive been secretive about the leaf collecting tho, I make sure I do it in neighborhoods where nobody knows me. I load up the car with leaf bags, drive in the "backway" into the neighborhood, pull into the garage and close the garage door and the gate so nobody sees me importing leaves. I worry about the next door neighbors seeing into my yard when they're upstairs.

They'll think Im nuts, EVERYBODY makes sure to pick up every stinking leaf and put it in a bag like its garbage and send it away.

I think I brought in easily 100 bags of leaves.

You'd have ask my neighbors. I'm sure they'd have plenty of stories to tell.

It was probably raking leaves OUT of the woods in January. I blew most of them into the woods in the fall last year, not having time to shred them. Then when I had time in winter, I went into the small patch of woods between our houses and was raking leaves out of the woods and bringing them to the driveway to shred.

:)
Dee

It might have been yesterday when I ran my bagging mower up and down my street sucking up the windrowed leaves before the leaf truck came to vacuum them.

Oh...

Stealing their "garbage"- leaves, grass clippings, and milk jugs for wintersowing.

Shredding leaves and dumping on all my planting beds in fall.

Carpeting areas of lawn with cardboard and "garbage".

Flipping compost in 100 degree weather.

Littering the back yard and front porch with 85 milk jugs full of potting mix and seeds in snow and ice storms. (My wintersowing routine).

Coming out of their houses, being startled by me in early morning, garbed in my nightgown, collecting seeds from their flowers.

Once my husband had dug out some old rose bushes for me. My neighbor saw him out there squirting the mud off of them. She came out and asked him "OK, now what is she going to do with THOSE?"

I'm sure they could add to the list. I seem to be the neighborhood oddity, useful just for the entertainment factor. My neighbors are all nice and none ever complain, at least not that I know of. They think I'm nuts but in my own endearing way.

Oh yeah, I always have such an excess of wintersown seedlings, sometimes they find me planting seedlings in their flower beds...

The list is pretty long.

Karen

Define weird.
.............
.............

One great by-product of being observed doing things that other people don't generally do is realizing that you no longer have to worry about getting caught:

Once the neighbors think you're a nut, you don't have to worry about making the neighbors think you're a nut.

There's a great deal of freedom in that.

The neighbor who works for a beer company thought I was nuts when he offered me a case of beer, & I told him I didn't drink beer, but if he ever had any that was out-of-date, I'd sure like to have it for the garden.

He told me later that he remembered our conversation.
When he poured out a whole case of flat beer under the drip line of a webworm-infested mulberry tree, the webworms disappeared within a few days!

When my cut finger was bleeding pretty freely, another neighbor caught me holding it out to drip beneath a rose bush while I struggled to get the band-aid on the cut.

& my very own brother looked at me a little strangely when I advised him how to get faster decomposition in his compost pile without using valuable time asking for other people's rotten vegetables ("p on it").

My neighbors are sure I'm nuts as I ask them for their hourse manure and cardboard, but they are happy to get rid of the stuff, especially when my two grandaughters will muck out their stables for them. The girls will be spending a good part of the weekend raking up their leaves for them also. The neighbors don't seem to mind having a strange lady living next door. They even help by delivering the manure to my garden in their trailor.

This doesn't quite meet the criteria but I once saw my dad washing the driveway. And then I tell you that we had a dirt driveway. What he was doing-
He had an old washtub with water and he would scoop dirt/gravel from the driveway and put it in the tub for a while and then spread it back out on the driveway. I never quite figured out what he was really managing to accomplish with this activity but he had a lawn chair nearby and I'm thinking this was as close as he could get to lounging out in the sun.
Now I'm wondering if this explains some things about me.

I have one neighbor that I talk to about our gardening adventures. I don't think that he thinks I'm odd. His wife found his old worms in their frig and asked If i wanted to add them to my worm bin. They were all dead, but the idea was nice. My other neighbors don't even take care of their yard. They have seen me throw their dogs poop back to their yard, take my trash and stuff it into my new garden beds, along with grass clippings, leaves, newspaper and cardboard.

I water using milk jugs with holes in the bottom, so my garden looks a little trashy at times. This year I mostly experiemented with different ideas as I learned about gardening. I did give my the young couple's kids an old butter container with a corn seed. It sprouted and died since they didn't know what to do with it.

tclynx:

Could your dad have been using water to separate the gravel from the dirt? Then spreading the dirt on the bottom, and the gravel on top? It could be a way to get a mostly gravel driveway using indigenous material.

Claire

claire,
I'm not entirely sure. It was probably mostly an excuse to enjoy the outdoors (the house where that had happened didn't have much property to do stuff like gardening so he only had his corn growing in the center of the driveway turnaround.

Anyway, when asked what he was doing, he did say "washing the driveway." I just couldn't see how effective such a method of washing was likely to be. It was indigenouse material which in that location in Michigan meant pretty sandy with small rocks.

Hard to tell. : )

I live in a condo and when we first moved here I wasn't into gardening at all but now I've gone hog wild. I've built 4 medium sized raised beds using retaining wall blocks and one huge one. As you can guess everyone thinks I'm nuts putting this kind of work and $$ into something I don't legally own. I even built 2 walls for my neighbor so that I could have more room to grow and this year I had to help her out with her plants in the front on my dime of course. No one but my closest neighbors know that I compost or they would probably freak out saying I was just drawing rodents and other strange creatures. I was out collecting leaves off the street today so I'm sure someone saw me and was wondering what I was doing. But hey they all enjoy the show during the spring and summer so what can they say.

Strouper

Yelling at my vegtable plants in the spring

Leaving piles of leaves here and there in the fall.

lol

Nobody here would find it all that odd, but a few of my neighbors think I'm nuts for spreading coffee grounds on the lawn.

But I think they find it even odder when I catch them carefully raking the leaves from their lawns and ask them for the leaves. What really convinces them I'm nuts is when I dump the leaves out on my lawn and run the mower over them.

The absolute weirdest thing was during the summer this year when I was filling the reservoir of my EarthBoxes in the pouring down rain with my garden hose. My next door neighbor actually came out in the rain to ask me what in the world I was doing. I explained that the EB cover prevents water from getting in and that my tomato plants required the reservoir to be filled every day. She just looked at me and shook her head. She still can't figure out how I get such large tomato plants out of that small container -but- she enjoys the tomatoes :-))

DL

Pouring the grease from my fryer out in the grass. There were many dire predictions about attracting bugs, ruining the soil and killing the grass. None of these thing ever happened.

Well it wasnt my neighbors, luckily. Today I found the most GIGANTIC punkin out on the curb, one of the size you see in the "guess the weight contests". It was bigger than my butt ;) and I couldnt even pick it up. I rolled it out to my car and tried and tried to pick it up but still couldnt. THINK THINK THINK, I had a tree saw in my trunk, so I cut in into thirds right there in the street and stuffed it in my car.

The seeds are GINORMOUS!!!!!

Already cut it up and bagged it up with leaves in leaf bags to keep in the garage for a week or two so its gets good and mushy and unappetizing to the squirrels.

its gonna stink in there, Im a little scaird.....

LOL, don't be scared Doris, it WILL break down. I can picture you trying to roll it, any chance you want to share some of those seeds?
Alberta

Having lived on the property since 79, I'm sure the neighbor's would have plenty of stories to tell y'all. Best one that comes to mind is us out planting potatoes on top of the ground. DH had gotten 2 pickup loads of bagged oak leaves and that's what we used to cover the sprouts as they grew. We had some old screens we tagged down with bricks. We almost caused an accident when we were harvesting. Just raked the leaves off and voila! Taters, about 200lbs of wonderful organic grown taters. It was a hoot! My sons who were just little guys were loading the taters in the wheelbarrow. Had several neighbors actually come by and ask all kinds of questions on how we did it and why.......LOL

Hey Alberta!

I put a seed offer up on the seed exchange. Id be happy to send you some, email me.

:)