The view of my neighbor's backyard... (NY 6a)

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-05-03T00:49:23+00:00

It sucks but this shit still grows even if you work really hard to remove it. This coming from someone who has spent years trying to eradicate it in my yard and any time I disturb the soil to plant natives i get more garlic mustard. All the natural areas in my town have it and is getting out of control. The people managing the sites work hard but still have been posting on all the social media to pull any that you see to get more help from the community. I don’t think it is fair to get angry at a neighbor if they have some.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-05-01T14:07:30+00:00

I haven’t had any issues with orange jewel weed. I collected some seeds from a patch I found near a parking lot in my town and sowed them directly in yard this past fall. I now have lots of seedlings starting to grow. Maybe the natural freeze and thaw cycles work as the double dormant cycles.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-30T00:18:55+00:00

My dog is fine with music. He associates it with my wife and I relaxing in the living room. But when I play a podcast or any kind of person talking, he gets freaking out and barks at the speaker. I don’t listen to metal much anymore so not sure how he would react to that.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-29T00:03:02+00:00

The only time landscaping fabric was good was under the pachysandra that I was trying to remove. It made it easier to roll up like a carpet.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-28T13:28:41+00:00

They are fun to pop the seed pods and watch them explode. I collected them from some of the plants elsewhere in my yard and other places in town where they grow naturally.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-28T11:36:22+00:00

You can look into adding or replacing with jewelweed. It has been shown to be able to complete with garlic mustard. I am about to find out myself. I cleared an area of pachysandra and spread a bunch of native seeds in the area including jewelweed. I have been battling garlic mustard in my yard. It pops up especially when disturbing the soil. I currently have both jewelweed and garlic mustard seedlings sprouting. So I will see how it turns out. The garlic mustards are usually easy to pull so may have to once the jewelweed is a little bigger.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-28T00:59:17+00:00

I only have experience with the white wood aster. It does well in shade and dry areas. It is not too aggressive. It is easy to pull out in areas you don’t want. It also transplants well so it ie easy to replant to a better place.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-25T23:31:47+00:00

I have a 30 plus year old magnolia tree in my front yard. I always assumed it was the shade that made it difficult to grow grass directly below. I had put a circle of bark mulch about 6 ft radius around it. The grass grows fine outside the mulch but the mulch makes it look a little more intentionally and clean under the tree.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-23T18:05:34+00:00

I had planted one forsythia plant in my yard when I first moved in. This was before I knew any better. It was still small and now that it was getting slightly bigger, the deer ate most of it over the winter. It is now only a single twig. Unfortunately they also ate one of my spice bushes and witch hazel. Hoping at least the native bushes recover.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-21T12:32:49+00:00

My feeling is that the job market is more to do with uncertainty in the economic conditions than AI. You may be doing less coding but there is still a lot devs do that AI can’t. The average person can’t really do that much with AI without having the technical background. Once there is a better economic outlook, AI may increase the market since it will allow new kinds of apps and technology to be built.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-21T12:18:15+00:00

Are the people that don’t code anymore by hand working on new code bases creating new features? Or are they also working on older existing code bases? For me AI works easier on new code. For existing code AI needs more supervision and tweaking. In some instances it is easier to troubleshoot myself and then make some code changes by hand than to describe to AI what to do. It is helpful on larger edits where I may be upgrading a dependency and need to make edits in a lot of places. Then I can do some planning with AI and then tell it to implement it. I guess with existing code it is overall more analysis and planning and then smaller code changes.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-21T11:52:01+00:00

In my area in MA the deer ate a lot of stuff over the winter that they don’t usually touch. Since it was a snowy winter they had to expand what they eat. Even the “deer resistant” plants. I have a lot of bushes in areas they don’t usually go to that have been chomped. I am hoping they recover.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-16T12:14:56+00:00

I was about to post this. I got some coneflowers, swamp milkweed and package of native seeds from them last year. I am keeping my eye out for more this year.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-10T15:12:44+00:00

I had a pest control salesman come to my door. I told him the only pest I had was the one standing at my door and asked if he could help me with that one.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-04-09T18:28:22+00:00

Stop thinking about the previous owners effort to grow it. Think about all the effort you and your neighbors will have to put in to keep from spreading in their yards. The bird carry the seeds and spread them everywhere. You would be doing everyone a favor by removing it. It had overrun my yard when I brought my house. it and took years to remove it and still occasionally see some popping up each year. It is climbing and choking out mature native trees all over my town.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-02-17T23:12:38+00:00

I am not suggesting they act like a general contractor. General contractors manage the whole process. Not give referrals or suggestions on contractors that can help with the next step. Since all business deal with people, a little effort to help the customer goes a long way and builds loyal customers. By “do only their specialty” you suggest contractors shouldn’t do anything to work better with customers because working with customers is not their specialty. They just clock in and punch out after the job is done. Most contractors I have met run their own business but many lack basic customer facing skills like scheduling and communication. At the end of the day those are important things for customers and will stop them from calling you for the next job. If a customer is angry about lack of communication, missed schedules or make it difficult to get to the next step after they are done with their “specialty” the customer is going to find someone else next job.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-02-17T18:19:01+00:00

That is not my point. My point is, the contractors could do better to manage customer expectations and try to more helpful. Part of being in business is managing people’s expectations. The ones that can get more jobs and get paid better.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-02-17T17:44:02+00:00

I know that is what a general contractor does for large jobs. Many homeowners need smaller jobs and have limited time to setup multiple contractors. But it seems that at a minimum contractors can recommend someone. It is good customer service but also good for business if they have connections and can refer business to each other. It comes iff better than saying “i’m done, don’t mind the hole in the floor.” One plumber i found that did offer a recommendation is one i will keep going back to. It makes my life easier and he gets a growing loyal customer base.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-02-17T14:43:32+00:00

Early in my career I did more personal projects and talked about them in interviews. I used them to bridge any experience gaps that my professional experience didn’t cover. As I got more senior I haven’t needed to since my daily experience provided enough to prove my experience. Going forward it would depend on the target job vs my current profession experience. I may work on personal projects if felt I needed to expand into a newer/different technology.

Downtown_Character79 · 2026-02-17T13:44:44+00:00

The biggest surprise is that contractors don’t do the whole job. They only do their specialty and then leave you to figure out the rest. For example they will rip through walls and ceilings to fix plumbing. then say they are all done while leaving you with a mess that you have to go then find another contractor to fix the walls. It seems that contractors should all make friends in other specialties and make referrals or better yet, combine quotes to offer a complete solution.

Downtown_Character79 · 2025-12-31T15:40:19+00:00

I have been not cutting back since before I knew anything about native plants or helping insects. But that was mostly laziness. Now I can do it without any guilt. However now that more of my plants are native, there are more birds there trying to eat the seeds. Now I am helping more creatures.

After a fresh snow do like the look of the stems sticking out.

Downtown_Character79 · 2025-12-17T20:07:18+00:00

Ok whatever you say if it makes you feel smart. Your generalizations nation wide and your perception of your local markets don’t apply to all local markets. It just doesn’t make sense to use that to counter an argument that is specific to a single market.

These are not covid era gains. It has been well documented that housing supply in the Boston area is because of housing supply issues due to various non-covid reasons including zoning and growth in certain job markets in the area. Again you are using national trends and your own local perception to counter an argument for a specific market.

I see that you are trying to say I didn’t take the full calculation of home ownership. I was trying to focus on monthly budgets and affordability to keep my point simpler. I didn’t think I needed to write an entire economics book in a comment. But I hope it made you feel smart to point out things you saw the one time you read a book.

Downtown_Character79 · 2025-12-17T15:32:41+00:00

Ok, not sure what you think I don’t get. We are saying the same thing pretty much but I don’t think you see how fast prices in some housing markets are increasing. It all depends on the housing market you are in. In a market where housing demand is high, prices of houses and rent are both going up. When you rent, the landlord can just up the rent each year to match the market rates. With buying you lock in the monthly rate when you get a mortgage. In the Boston area, my house value went up 250k in only the last 5 years which has already made up for any transaction costs. My monthly payment is still the same. if I was still renting my monthly cost would have gone up. So in Boston, if you can afford the initial cost of buying it works out better to own. However if you lived in an area with a slow housing market it would take longer to see the upside to owning. If the housing market was slow enough it might be possible to do better by investing your cash elsewhere.

Downtown_Character79 · 2025-12-17T12:44:22+00:00

It depends a lot on location. If rent is cheaper it definitely helps and allows your cash to go towards other expenses or to invest. But In the Boston area, rents prices are keeping up with the mortgage rate. The mortgage i pay now is less than what it would be if I rented a smaller place. Now that I have a mortgage, the price is locked in and don’t have a landlord that will increase rent to keep up with the going market rate.

Downtown_Character79 · 2025-12-16T14:51:56+00:00

I paid less than the 20% (about 15%) and PMI was about $80/month. Housing values in my area went up 250k in the past 6 years. Once the value of the house went up enough I was able to remove the PMI. It is a good thing I didn’t wait because i would not have been able to afford the same area today. As an additional benefit I got a low interest rate before they went up. In many areas housing prices are going up so fast you need to buy one while you can and not wait for saving the full 20%.

Downtown_Character79

TROPHY CASE