On Thu, 8 May 2003 09:16:56 +0100, Charlie wrote:

Could you not just put the paint on top of the wall so that you would only
get covered if you actually sat on it, which would quite possibly be
trespassing anyway?

What that amounts to is taking the law into your own hands.
They're not trespassers until the judge says so. But:

I have a 6' chainlink fence across one end of my property. For
many years, the local teenagers used my place as a shortcut, and
simply hopped over the old 4' wooden fence that was in the same
position earlier.

As I anticipated when I had the old fence replaced, some of them
were bold enough to scramble over the new, taller, chainlink one.
I stopped this by smearing vaseline on the top rail at the
hopping-over point, at the suggestion of a friend. The
shortcutters presumably touched it, got grossed out by the feel,
and desisted.

The shortcutting stopped and hasn't resumed.


--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

In a fit of excitement Rick McGreal uttered:

"Charlie" wrote in
:

Could you not just put the paint on top of the wall so that you would
only get covered if you actually sat on it, which would quite possibly
be trespassing anyway? They're talking about something similar on
Essex FM this morning about trespassers and burglars. Something about
a woman phoned the police after she saw someone in the garden, it took
them 4 hours to get there and catch him and then they told her that if
she'd done anything then she would be the one in prison, not him.
It's a terrifying thought as a young 18 year old girl who's about to
move out on her own!

To be honest the way the law is at the moment any kind of radical
protection scheme is porobably going to backfire on you....

The best advice I can think of is to try not to advertise that you have
goods worth stealing.....

As a person who has suffered just simple vandalism for no good reason I can
sypathise with others.....
I'd love to be able to put in a laser point defense system to vaporise
anyone that wanders into my garden.....But alas the law looks after
criminals rather than the victims.....B-(

The only other suggestion is not to move to a place where there is a lot of
social problems....Although how do you know until you move there?

Hmmm... Laser vapourisers - Nice thought, but what happens when you come
home late from the pub one night and forget... ?
LOL
--
\\(º`¿´º)//
It's probably on http://support.microsoft.com/ somewhere....
If you can be bothered to look for it....

In a fit of excitement Exiddor uttered:

I live in a semi located on a corner of a road and we are constantly
disturbed by youths sitting on the garden wall, drinking and shouting until
the early hours.

I solved the problem by putting railings along the top of my section of the
garden wall, but my neighbour (an old lady of 70-something) can not afford
anything like this.

Can anyone suggest a cheap (legal!) solution to this problem?

Spread lots of nice fatty Bird food on the top of the wall, then watch the
fun as the little beggars sit on all the birdie poo.... Cheap and
efficient, as well as nice to watch both birds and kids getting what they
deserve !!
Nobody would be going to prosecute you for feeding the birds?
--
\\(º`¿´º)//
It's probably on http://support.microsoft.com/ somewhere....
If you can be bothered to look for it....

"Bevan Price" wrote
"Exiddor" wrote
I live in a semi located on a corner of a road and we are
constantly
disturbed by youths sitting on the garden wall, drinking and
shouting
until the early hours.

I solved the problem by putting railings along the top of my
section of
the garden wall, but my neighbour (an old lady of 70-something) can
not afford
anything like this.
Can anyone suggest a cheap (legal!) solution to this problem?

Water sprinkler in garden which just happens to spray water onto the
wall ?
Bevan

Combined with a movement meter...............:~)))
You'd have to experiment to get it just right so that it only started
'watering' if someone actually sat on the wall. You would.nt want to
spray all passers by :~))

There are cat scarers kits on the market which work on the same
principle.......

Jenny

Bigjon wrote in
:

In a fit of excitement Rick McGreal uttered:

Hmmm....I don't think I've ever done anything in a fit of excitemnent....
Other than jump for joy....And thats few and far between! B-)

Hmmm... Laser vapourisers - Nice thought, but what happens when you
come home late from the pub one night and forget... ?
LOL

Thats where I'm on a winner...I don't drink...Hence don't goto the pub....
I don't jump over my own wall as I don't want to damage my own flower
beds....

So on all accounts anything that comes over the wall is simply target
practice....

Considering this a gardening newsgroup, I'm a little surprised how few of
the replies to this question involved the use of plants! And a little
horrified at the extreme measures being suggested by others. Maybe I'm just
lucky to live in a rural area....although that doesn't stop us from having
similar problems. It's not our wall they sit on (because of the plants
growing on it among other things) but by the bus stop just over the
road....they're still noisy and intrusive especially on summer evenings. My
husband invited them all in for a beer one evening. Now they do quieten
down if we ask them to. You can hardly blame kids for trying to find
somewhere to congregate in the evenings when there are no alternatives.
Treating them like undesirable aliens is hardly going to help their sense
of alienation. No doubt I'm being naive and you will soon disillusion me.
I'll carry on feeling lucky to live where I do!
Anita

On Thu, 08 May 2003 05:22:08 GMT, Exiddor wrote:

I live in a semi located on a corner of a road and we are constantly
disturbed by youths sitting on the garden wall, drinking and shouting until
the early hours.

I solved the problem by putting railings along the top of my section of the
garden wall, but my neighbour (an old lady of 70-something) can not afford
anything like this.

Can anyone suggest a cheap (legal!) solution to this problem?

When I posted my question I never imagined I'd start a thread of 73
articles, plus 24 private emails - I guess this touched a raw nerve
somewhere! ;-)

I passed on all your ideas to the lady next door and she's now decided that
a privet hedge would be nice and would solve her problems.

So, as I'm not a gardening-type person, I now need to ask advice of all you
gardening experts once again. Can one just go out and buy a ready-made
privet hedge (from some place like a gardening centre) that will extend
above the 2.5-foot wall and be sufficiently "bushy" to cover the top of the
wall, or are we talking about growing something over many years?

Any further advice appreciated.

--
Exiddor.

The message
from Mike contains these words:

Local Bye Law now forbids Skate boarders on pavements and roads. Police
active on telling them off. What are we doing about it? Consulting the
youth who want to Skateboard, asking them where 'we' can get information
and asking 'them' to design a Skateboard park and for 'them' to write
the rules for 'their' club I am proposing.

Unless the law has changed, it is illegal to use *ANY* wheeled vehicle,
including prams and shopping trolleys etc on a public footpath. Includes
pavements of public roads.

Beside a local supermarket there is a nice wide path which kids use
skateboards on - not all the time, and not dangerously (that I've ever
seen) and there are notices all along the wall beside it saying "No
skateboarding allowed."

One lad of about sixteen was trundling along it doing no-one any harm
when a sharp-voiced woman said "Can't you read? It says 'no
skateboarding allowed'."

Couldn't resist it: I said to her: "That doesn't mean you're not allowed
to skateboard, it only means that *YOU* are permitted to use the path
without being on a skateboard."

She looked sour and the boy went away looking like the cat that had the cream.

Maybe I am lucky in that I am involved on reviving the local football
club and able to get these things incorporated into the whole site.
Football Pitch with Grandstand, Club House with function rooms, Bowls
Green with pavilion and a Skate board park. INDOORS so it will be all
the year round and all weather. And car parking on site for about 80
cars.

The site will therefore bring together the Youth, the not so Youth and
us old wrinklies who are catering for the Youth.

Good. I haven't been in this particular bit of the village for long
enough to begin taking initiatives like that. I'll lurk for a bit and
see what might be needed.

--
Tony
Replace solidi with dots to reply: tony/anson snailything zetnet/co/uk

http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi

The message
from "JennyC" contains these words:

Water sprinkler in garden which just happens to spray water onto the
wall ?
Bevan

Combined with a movement meter...............:~)))
You'd have to experiment to get it just right so that it only started
'watering' if someone actually sat on the wall. You would.nt want to
spray all passers by :~))

There are cat scarers kits on the market which work on the same
principle.......

If we are going to get complicated, let's go the whole hog. Cover the
top of the wall with an insulator, and put a metal capping on top. Raise
the potential of the metal by nine volts. Nothing will be noticed at
first, but after a while any sweat permeating the seats of their pants
will begin to conduct a very slight current, which will be mildly
uncomfortable without being dangerous.

Or, getting mechanised, use the cat-detecting sensor as above to pump a
few drops of some noxious-smelling gas along a perforated tube at the
bottom of the wall.

But the simplest solution would be to lay a course of ridging bricks
along the top.

--
Tony
Replace solidi with dots to reply: tony/anson snailything zetnet/co/uk

http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi

In article , A.Malhotra
writes
Considering this a gardening newsgroup, I'm a little surprised how few of
the replies to this question involved the use of plants! And a little
horrified at the extreme measures being suggested by others. Maybe I'm just
lucky to live in a rural area....although that doesn't stop us from having
similar problems. It's not our wall they sit on (because of the plants
growing on it among other things) but by the bus stop just over the
road....they're still noisy and intrusive especially on summer evenings. My
husband invited them all in for a beer one evening. Now they do quieten
down if we ask them to. You can hardly blame kids for trying to find
somewhere to congregate in the evenings when there are no alternatives.
Treating them like undesirable aliens is hardly going to help their sense
of alienation. No doubt I'm being naive and you will soon disillusion me.
I'll carry on feeling lucky to live where I do!

Agreed. In some ways it's a lot harder being a kid now. When I was
young, you could spend the whole days outside and in each other's
gardens from about age 4, and go further afield from age 9 or so.
Nowadays it's not safe to let your kids do that - not so much because of
'stranger danger' which is still a low risk (though appalling in
consequences) but because the number of cars on the road had almost
trebled in that time. So kids don't learn the self-reliant play skills
that we used to.

And all the exciting playgrounds of my youth (also known as building
sites) are now barred to them.

Add to that the increasing difficulty of seeing a way of bettering
yourself if you start at the bottom of the heap, and no wonder we have
people who feel that they don't really have a part in society.

Easy, of course, to say all this if you have enough money to cushion
yourself from the ill-effects, a lot more difficult if you have no
choice over where you live and can't afford to make it secure. My
liberal principles were in abeyance for a few weeks after the local
sneak-thief targetted us, and I was delighted to hear that a local
caretaker had thrown him over a 6ft wall :-)

--
Kay Easton

Edward's earthworm page:
http://www.scarboro.demon.co.uk/edward/index.htm

The message
from Kay Easton contains these words:

And all the exciting playgrounds of my youth (also known as building
sites) are now barred to them.

And most of mine are tarmacadam or housing estates. The HSE would have
had a fit if
a) it had been about at the time, and
b) it had seen my haunts and wht I got up to when an anklebiter.

--
Tony
Replace solidi with dots to reply: tony/anson snailything zetnet/co/uk

http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi

On Fri, 09 May 2003 15:04:52 GMT, Exiddor wrote:

When I posted my question I never imagined I'd start a thread of 73
articles, plus 24 private emails - I guess this touched a raw nerve
somewhere! ;-)

I passed on all your ideas to the lady next door and she's now decided that
a privet hedge would be nice and would solve her problems.

So, as I'm not a gardening-type person, I now need to ask advice of all you
gardening experts once again. Can one just go out and buy a ready-made
privet hedge (from some place like a gardening centre) that will extend
above the 2.5-foot wall and be sufficiently "bushy" to cover the top of the
wall, or are we talking about growing something over many years?

Any further advice appreciated.

http://www.hedging.co.uk are inexpensive and good quality. I
purchased 19 x pot grown Pyracantha from them a couple of months ago
for £45. Very pleased with the service, and the plants.

You might find this useful as well :
http://www.hedging.co.uk/acatalog/securityhedging.html

You'd have to grow them to the correct size as they're a little short
for your 2.5 foot wall, but it should take too long especially if
they're fed and watered correctly.

Once they're established you should be able to train them to cover the
wall ... I've not got that far with mine, and I'm no expert, but no
doubt someone will be along very shortly with words of wisdom ...


Steve

I purchased 19 x pot grown Pyracantha from them a couple of months ago
for £45. Very pleased with the service, and the plants.

Steve

I just bought a few Pyracantha plants and took lots of cuttings. They root very
easily. So if you are prepared to wait an extra one - two years you can do this
very cheaply. Pyracantha is used widely in public places such as surrounding car
parks. If you've got the nerve it doesn't hurt to snip one or two pieces (about 4
inches long) from well established bushes (with permission of course) or find out
when they are likely to be trimmed and ask if you can take a handful of hedge
trimmings home with you. I generally get a rooting rate of about 75%. Just tear
off the lower leaves, dip the tip into hormone rooting compound and push into a
pot of compost or garden soil. You can cram about 20 cuttings into an 8 inch pot.
Well water and keep in a North facing position for about six months until roots
start to emerge from the bottom of the pot. Split them up and plant them where
required. Keep well fed and watered for the first year.

--
Drakanthus.


(Spam filter: Include the word VB anywhere in the subject line or emails
will never reach me.)

"Anthony E Anson"

But the simplest solution would be to lay a course of ridging bricks
along the top.
Tony

Brilliant !!!!!!!
THE solution :~)
Jenny