My Chicago Garden

Couple things have happened in the last two weeks….

I’ve been invited to present to the Men’s Garden Club of Villa Park on Organic Gardening on August 28th at 7:30PM.  The presentation is for an hour or so, which means I can’t just ramble. I actually need to have an outline and do some research. I’ll post my research and maybe a recording of the presentation when I’m done.

After reading the book "Last Child In The Woods: Saving our children from nature deficit disorder" my wife and I decided to build a tree house in the monster maple tree in our backyard.  I didn’t want to damage the tree so it’s really a play house in a tree with posts holding up the house, not the tree holding up the house. But the point is to get the kids playing in nature instead of inside.

Well, it seems one of my neighbors wasn’t too thrilled about the idea and called the zoning and code enforcement department of Wheaton, IL.  Little did my neighbor know that I’m a closet lawyer and had already completely researched the regulations and had over designed the tree house from a code standpoint.  I mean, who uses hurricane clips on every joist for a tree house? The tree house is probably better built than the real house.  A zoning and code enforcement woman came out to visit and tell us about the complaint.  She looked over the work we had done (about 90% complete) and told us we were well within our rights to do what we were doing and everything was fine.  Of course I knew that already.

While she was talking to my wife she also said that another neighbor (could be the same one, the calls are anonymous) called to complain about tall weeds in my front garden.  Those weeds by the way….those are sunflowers, and they’re over 8 foot tall with 6 or 7 giant blooms on them.  The lady commented that she drives in our neighborhood all the time and has been thrilled to see the progress we have made on the house and wonders why neighbors arn’t more happy that we are doing something.  Oh well.  The next time I see the neighbors outside I’ll walk over and find out what the deal is and see if we can work it out.  I mean, that’s what neighbors are suppose to do right? Not call the cops when the "weeds" get tall.