It was mid-August when Jenny Chen and her fianceé Brian Jordan first noticed their backyard garden turning brown. Over the last two summers, the couple grew flowers, herbs, tomatoes, squashes, and other vegetables.

“They were all being overcome with some kind of brown spots and it was affecting not just one type of vegetable or fruit,” Chen said in her lifeless backyard. “It took about a week for it to get to look like what it does now, with just total die off.”

Looking at her plants, Chen remembered Amtrak spraying herbicides near her house in Belmont back in 2015. Residents had been complaining about the jungle-like weeds growing near the tracks along Mantua Avenue between 31st and 34th street.

“Their response was just to spray everywhere [with herbicides] and it created a very similar look to what we noticed that week,” Chen said.

Chen and Jordan’s house on Mantua Avenue borders a rail yard with five tracks used by Amtrak and Septa trains. A three-foot fence marks the end of their backyard, then there’s a three-foot alleyway with three relatively small trees, followed by an Amtrak fence, about six feet tall. Beyond that, there’s a drop of about 25 feet into the closest track, and then another drop to a lower track.

Chen thinks Amtrak sprayed the herbicides up from the track area, resulting on the herbicides coming 16 feet into her yard. The trees look brown and half dead now, and Chen worries dead branches might now fall into her yard or down onto the tracks.

After the couple contacted Air Management Services from the city’s Health Department, Daniel Duer, a field technician from Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture, visited and took soil and plant samples. After his visit, Duer informed Chen and Jordan that on August 16th, Amtrak contractors had used four herbicides and two chemical surfactants, a solution that increases the herbicide penetration, coverage and effectiveness.

“It was kind of scary,” Chen said.

Because they had received no notification, the couple continued to eat the vegetables from their garden.They’re not sure what kind of health effect that could have.

Even setting aside the health concerns, the couple is sad to see their garden die and furious at Amtrak for apparently causing it. Not only did they lose their vegetable production, and all the work that went into it, but the couple lost something more sentimental, too. Last April, Jordan proposed to Chen by planting tulips in the garden beds.