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When you drive onto my city street, you see houses on one side, a four-acre vineyard on the other.

Us homeowners maintain trim street frontages. The vineyard owners don’t. Therein lies the problem.

The grapes are owned by out-of-towners who bought the remnant of an old orchard a dozen years ago and planted vines. The house at the center of the vineyard is occupied on weekends by groups of people who generally arrive on Fridays, disappear behind two perimeter fences and a gate, then leave on Sundays. They organize their fun around a pool.

I can live with the visitors, whoever they are. Ditto the ag workers who regularly prune and spray sulfur.

I’d rather have grapes than the six homes that zoning would allow.

The issue is the aesthetics of the 6-foot strip that lies between our street and the double fence. It’s home to mostly weeds and the occasional California poppy.

Us homeowners have issues with this scraggly fringe. It violates the accepted standards of suburban yard maintenance, biodiversity be damned.

Seemingly for this reason, one of my neighbors has been clearing the vineyard fringe across from his house every spring. He whacks it good. And this summer I spied another neighbor in the act of leveling his stretch of vineyard property weeds.

So I had to ask myself if I should join in and treat a neighbor’s weeds as an extension of my own yard. It would be cathartic. It might raise property values. But it could also make me look super nit-picky.

I punted. I had bigger fish to fry.

The vineyard property also borders a stretch of Partrick Road where the fringe is an untamed jungle. The overgrown vegetation makes it dicey for motorists leaving my street to spot vehicles bombing down Partrick as they try to pull out.

My view was compromised in two ways. First, by a low-hanging branch on a vineyard oak that died two years ago, but hasn’t been removed. Second, by a bushy tree that had sprouted next to the roadway and was now approaching 4 feet tall.

As for the dead oak, I worried that it was more than just a sight block. Was it a victim of sudden oak death and a threat to my own trees? And all that dead wood — was it a neighborhood fire hazard?

I thought about zapping it with my electric chainsaw, running the cord 100 or more yards from a Courtney socket. Instead, I got out my lopping shears.

I attacked at the crack of dawn. It took only a few minutes to give the drooping branch a haircut.

I was proud of myself. What a difference one person with lopping shears can make in this world.

That left the upstart tree crowding the Partrick roadway. It had already engulfed a paddle marker.

I returned a week later. Dismemberment took a bit longer, but the result was more spectacular. The view up Partrick was now practically pristine.

About the time I was lopping branches on Partrick, two “Slow Down Napa” signs went up on my street and a “Drive 25 Napa” sign went up on Partrick. (The speed limit on this stretch of Partrick is 30, but I’m not going to quibble.)

I was impressed. First the weed whacking, now the signs. My year-round neighbors are an activist bunch. They haven’t retreated into their own bubbles.

None of us has much power to influence world events or save the planet. But when it comes to whacking weeds, removing errant tree growth and improving traffic safety, the folks on Borrette Lane are on it!

Kevin can be reached at kfcourtney@yahoo.com.

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