One renter took to Reddit recently to ask for advice after their landlord inexplicably chopped down their lemon tree.
"Landlord chopped down [my] lemon tree but it's coming back. How should I best help it thrive?" they asked their fellow members of the r/vegetablegardening subreddit. They included several pictures of the stump and the new tree.
Unfortunately, most of the advice indicated that the new lemons that would eventually grow would not be nearly as nice as the previous ones would have been.
"Judging by the large thorns, it was a grafted tree, and this is just the rootstock growing back now, and the citrus varieties typically used for rootstocks unfortunately don't produce good fruit," wrote one commenter.
"Those are likely to be suckers. I let some grow once, they grew the most awful bitter green orange fruit," wrote another.
A third commenter asked what would seem to be the most pertinent question, writing, "Why'd they cut down the tree in the first place?"
For reasons that are often clear only to them, landlords are notorious for destroying tenants' gardens. Another Redditor recently shared photos of the aftermath of her landlord weed-whacking their broccoli, while another shared that their landlord had cut down a tree in their front yard for seemingly no reason.
Why landlords would, at their own personal expense, make an effort to worsen their properties and their tenants' quality of life is something of a mystery. However, it is important to note that in some cases, their interference may be illegal.
One property manager's attempts to evict tenants for hanging their laundry to dry outside (which saves energy and reduces pollution) led to California passing a law that says that all state residents have the "right to dry" by hanging their laundry outside.
Homeowners associations are similarly problematic, in that they also love to impose nonsensical rules that limit homeowners' ability to adopt money-saving, eco-friendly changes to their homes.
If you are dealing with such an HOA, know that there are steps you can take to combat them including getting bylaws changed and forcing the HOA to adhere to state laws.
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