UPDATED - Oh yeah, I'm THAT kind of neighbor!

UPDATE: It's 8pm on Monday night, and I hear a weedwacker in the yard behind ours! They've actually been out there for two hours. Yep, that's how bad it was. I can no longer see the 8-foot weeds sticking up above our fence! Hurray!!!!!

I've been battling thistle in our backyard ever since we moved in to this house-- for four summers. It's never a problem in the front yard, just in the back. Well, in the last week or so, I've noticed the tops of some thistles sticking up from the yard of the house behind us. Mind you, I'm seeing them over the top of our SIX FOOT FENCE, and their house is downhill from us. I started thinking about it, and I realized those suckers must be seven or eight feet tall! What are they feeding them? Thistle steroids?!! No wonder we have so many thistles in the backyard.

Well, I got sick of watching the down drift off the tops of these doped up thistles into my backyard, so I decided to conduct a stealth attack. I got out the ladder and my clippers, and climbed up there to lean over the fence and chop off the tops of the really big ones. And this is what I saw:

Holy. Sheeeeet. This picture really doesn't do it justice. It looks like it freakin' snowed back there, there's so much thistle down. The whole backyard, covered with thistles. The baby ones are two feet tall. It used to be all juniper on that hillside, then a year or two ago they took it all out. Then never did anything with that slope. And what does thistle love? A hot, dry bed of dirt with no other foliage to disturb it. The thistle has moved in and taken over. And allllllll that down is going to blow into my backyard. The neighbors to their south also border our backyard, and it doesn't look much better over there. Why didn't they just leave the junipers?! It's the perfect lazy man's landscaping.

So what did I do? I called the city & made a complaint. They're going to give them a ticket, and if they don't fix it within seven days, the city will hire a contractor to do it and bill the homeowner. Sure, I could've gone and knocked on their door, but I'm a little scared of them. Not just because their backyard is a trash heap, but also because they have dogs that they are not kind to. I'm afraid of people who aren't kind to their pets. I'm afraid they'll hurt me too. Uh-oh. What have I started here? Oh well. At least I won't have to dig 75,000 thistles out of my backyard this fall.