What is up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. I'm Kevin and I'm here with my friend Ben Hale of Easy Living Yards. We've been talking a lot about landscaping and now we're tying it to, you know, some of the things that you may not consider when you're thinking about landscaping, but you are going to have to consider. And that would be your neighbors, if you're living in an H.O. way and how do you manage that

delicate balance of relationships because that's what it that's what it's really about and

Ben's got a pretty interesting story.

So I figured Ben, it might just be good

for you to start off with how this

has impacted your gardening.

Sure, it's great to be back again, Kevin.

I'm excited to be here. And yeah, so I have an interesting back story when it comes to living with neighbors, also HOA, and also being able to do the things you want to do with your landscape.

And so the reality is a lot of us now increasingly live in more urban and suburban conditions

and we live a lot closer to neighbors than people used to 50 years ago.

And so for us, we moved into our current home about six years ago and it was a really rough

home. So it had been poorly treated for about

15 years and it was horrible condition and we need to do tons of work on the

interior and exterior of the home before we could even feel comfortable living in it, let alone raise a family.

And so during this process, we knew that we couldn't be living in an HOA and we purchased our home knowing

that it wasn't in an HOA.

Well as it turns out, we live in a township and this township actually has a lot of codes written very similar to an HOA.

And so we actually dealt with some issues here, even though we are home from day one was in better condition than any day previous to when we own this home, we actually

got a property maintenance violation for not cutting our lawn because we were

focusing on, for one, we had a baby that was born about three weeks before this violation and secondly

we were working on repairing our home and so unfortunately our neighbors were well this

neighbor specifically was not

...