We bought another farm over the winter and have been spending a lot of time there working and fixing the place up. Most of the houses around there are rentals and that is ok. The people have no say in anything so they don't bother us. The other neighbor is the widow of the guy who we bought the farm from and she still farms a smaller area. She is a great lady and is always happy to help when ever she can. But the neighbor on the opposite side has one horse, a half mile horse track, lives in a trailer and owns just under 20 acres with a few small barns on their property. Their trailer is on the opposite side of their property from our border.
About a month ago I was plowing behind the vineyard where I am going to expand the vineyard and the neighbor lady with the horse walks over to talk to me and my father (who just arrived to check on things). Her purpose of coming over to talk is to tell us we can't open up a ditch on our property because the previous owner did supposedly and it flooded the back of their property (all the land slopes to the back of their property). At the time I was plowing and we were not doing any ditch work but she made sure we knew she had a lawyer and she wouldn't be afraid to use him if we did anything she didn't like (very personable exchange).
Fast forward to today and I am on the boundry with my excavator working on digging out stumps along the road and piling pine limbs. There is a shallow swale along the boundry that I would like to clean out as I have water standing on the headland of the vineyard and would like to give it a better path away. As I was working on the stumps I see this ladies husband start mowing over towards me. He mows around the outside blowing the clippings in towards his property. I wave to him as he keeps going and he waves back. So I decide I want to verify the boundry and discuss my idea with him so that they would be included in the decision process and hopefully avoid any hard feelings. When I see him mowing towards me on his second pass around I shut down and hop out of the excavator and stand right on the edge of his first pass waiting for him so that I could introduce myself and talk with him. As he gets up to me he sees me standing there and I wave to him, his mower deck has the deflector propped up so the clippings shoot up high in the air. Anytime I see someone standing next to where I am working I stop. Well this guy says something to me as he gets close and I couldn't hear what he said over his mower but he never stopped and went right past me blowing grass clippings all over me in the process as I stood 3' away from him looking directly at him trying to be neighborly. He continued on his way and never looked back
I found it extremely rude and actually dangerous what he did and it made me mad. I wanted to try and do the right thing and discuss and include the neighbors with boundry decisions that benifit/affect both of us. I am going to call a surveyor this week and see when they can mark that boundry for me. When its marked I am going to decide my options at that point but am I wrong in feeling upset with these neighbors? The wife introduces herself just to tell me what I "can't" do on my land and the husband blows grass all over me without even stopping. Any thoughts on how I should handle or should have handled it? I keep trying to look at things from their perspective and to a point I could understand where the wife was coming from but I don't know the particulars of what happened as it was quite a few years ago but the husband just baffles me as I can't see any reason how anyone could intentionally blow grass clippings on a person standing 3' away from them on the boundry while making eye contact.
