Cranky Old Men

Sometimes you end up with neighbors you can't get along with. When we first got our garden plot I was really excited to see the old man working in the plot next to ours. My hope was that I had found an informational resource. Certainly he had been with the community garden for a long time, for years our garden tour guide told us as we looked around the first time. Since we are taking care of another person's plot we decided to plant fast growing items and one or two long term items that would hopefully ripen before he came back. Unfortunately when we finally met  the gentlemen he was more of a Mr. MacGregor, the rabbit eater, than the kindly old gardener of my dreams. Throughout our 8 months on the plot I have seen him twice, and only twice. He has not weeded in months and the two times I saw him he blamed us for his weed problem. (Please note his weeds were as high as my thigh, and as thick as my arm.)
Today he was there, weeding his plot for the third time and he started whacking at my squash. "It appears to be spreading." he said by way of greeting me. I immediately said I'd take care of it. So I placed a screen there to keep the wandering squash away from him. (Despite the fact that his weeds continue to infest our plot.) I smiled and started to walk away when he started to mention how we shouldn't let our weeds get so bad. Our relatively empty lot had only a single row of flowering lettuce and some corn and squash. I tried to explain that they were lettuce but he took a very close look, gave me the hairy eyeball and declared "weeds!".
As he walked away I wondered how this hunchbacked man, who we've called MacGregor since we first met him, made it so many years at the garden where everyone else seems slightly odd, but friendly. I am hoping our corn and squash just don't bother him anymore, because I'm pretty sure that they can't take another beating.