Poisoned

Our neighbor decided to clean and then re-stain her back fence. So she got some stuff called "household cleaner", mixed it up and put it in the tank of a power sprayer. First, she misted the cleaner all over the fence--a reasonably gentle spray, but still capable of spreading to other places in the vicinity. Then she proceeded to power-blast the supposed dirt off her back fence, sending up a great plume of cleaner/water about fifteen feet high. Some of that hit the back corner of my garden, which isn't very large to begin with.

After my younger daughter came running to me in distress, I went out to see what had happened, and found the leaves on the lambs quarters nearest the fence, plus all the leaves in my three-foot-square bed nearest the fence covered with huge droplets of this chemical-laced water. I yelled to the woman to stop, and asked her what she was using, which she first claimed was just water, then explained that the stuff in the sprayer's tank was the cleaner diluted with water. "But I used a different nozzle," she explained. I looked at the bottle of cleaner, which just said "Household Cleaner" and did not list any ingredients but warned that the stuff could not be eaten, as it was poison. The problem is, the chemical water and the regular water still went through the same sprayer attachment, different nozzle notwithstanding, so even if it was just the "regular water" that hit my plants, it would still have some of that chemical in it. I called Sears, who could not help me at all. Then I called Craftsman, who could not find a chemical list for "Household Cleaner" but who advised that I treat it as you would any household cleaner and DO NOT INGEST. Which of course means that I cannot eat any of my vegetables from that bed.

All of my beets, kale, chard, and collard greens are useless now. I had to pull up the entire bed worth of greens and throw them all away, because there is no way to be sure that even if you wash the greens, that household cleaner would not still be on the leaves. (I also lost that one standard cabbage I had blogged about earlier--it was in the neighboring bed but had water droplets on it.) I don't even know what the case is with the soil underneath the plants--did some of that cleaner run down into my soil, and how will that impact my abilty to replant?

The woman knows that I lost the entire bed worth of greens and that it's her fault. She apologized and agreed that when it comes time to paint/stain the fence in that corner, she'll do it by hand. But it's too late. The damage is already done. She just cost my family well over two month's worth of organically grown greens--what we would have consumed, what the plants would have continued making, and what I might have been able to put away for the off season. If my daughter hadn't seen what happened, what then? Our greens would have sat there in the hot sun, absorbing water laced with household cleaner, which we would later have consumed. In essence, our neighbor poisoned my family and didn't even realize what she was doing.

I feel sick.