Gardening can be a great way to get outdoors, improve your mental health, and even grow some of your own food. It can also be a great way to deal with your neighbor's questionable radio station choices, as one Redditor recently showed.
"Hello fellow PNW gardeners!" the Redditor wrote, posting in the r/pnwgardening subreddit. "Just moved into this space. We have a neighbor that blasts talk radio all day everyday pointed directly at my office. Looking for something to block sound and not invade their space, as I do not want to deal with that confrontation."
Luckily, several other members of the forum had advice for what types of native plants could be used to create a sound barrier.
"Sound will be hard to block with just plants, but red flowering currant and mock orange are two natives that would work well. Mock orange smells really good, is drought tolerant," one commenter wrote. "Red flowering currant has nice red/magenta blooms in the spring and shouldn't need much water once established and produces berries in late summer/fall."
"Thimbleberry is thornless, has lovely white flowers, native, and grows surprisingly fast (like 1.5 ft a year). It will need a little staking or trellising to shape it up but it would mix well with the other suggestions," wrote another.
"I too am using plants to muffle my neighbor's noises. I've found that Oregon Grape is the best one so far. Might also want to look into thimbleberry, salmonberry or blue elderberry for layering and diversity," a third commenter chimed in.
In other cases, some home gardeners have recommended planting entire walls of trees to block out unwanted noise.
As another commenter pointed out, whatever the original poster goes with here will likely take years to fill in (and won't act as a total sound barrier even when it does). But even if they aren't fully successful at blocking out the talk radio, at least they got a fun gardening project out of it, as well as the sense of partial satisfaction that comes with doing something to address a problem.
Multiple studies have drawn links between getting outside — by hiking, camping, gardening, playing sports, or whatever — and improving mental health. Gardening in particular has been shown to decrease stress levels, so even if the original poster continues to experience the unwanted noise, at least they will be better equipped to deal with it.
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