Today, I am continuing working on the East end of the maple grove, and have just stopped for a hydration break before finishing for the day.

I am thinking it would be a good idea to rent a wood chipper in the fall.  There is just SO much wood being cleaned and cleared away.

So this is what the area looked like on Saturday, after I cleared out the old garden path.

Apparently, the only photos I have taken from the other end don’t show the whole area.  Ah, well.

An interesting thing about my taking all these before and after pictures, as that I have a time record, too.  I don’t typically pay attention to what time I start or finish, but my phone’s camera is set to use the date and time in the file names.  This means I can say with confidence that I worked about 1 1/2 hours, starting just before noon, in this area.

This is what I did in that 1 1/2 hours. 🙂

I started by clearing away by the water tap.  For that one, I just had to take some video.

So… that post isn’t doing anything useful anymore. 😦

I cleared out a couple of dead spruces beside the tap, one of which was rotten enough that I just broke the trunk at ground level and pulled it out.  There were some elms growing out of an old trunk that was pretty big when someone finally cut it down.  That’s the one that has me wondering if the roots have caused any problems with the underground water pipe.

There was another dead spruce nearby that I took down.

I even got it to fall right on my pile! 😀

As I moved on and went to pull some stuff out of the grass by another dead tree, I stepped on something that sank under my foot.

Do you see it?

Neither could I.  Even after using the weed trimmer here, I see nothing.

It was some fence wire that was rolled up, but ended up flattened at some point. From the looks of the rusty old soup can I also found under it, it’s been here for quite a long time!

I moved the two tillers closer to the shed so I could clear where they were sitting.  That included moving two garbage cans (one of which was partially sheltering a tiller) and piece of aluminum that looks like it is part of ducting for a large building that used to shelter a push mower.  My brother took the mower to see if he could fix it.

When I went to take out some other fence wire in the area I found…

… a chokecherry tree and some vines growing through it.

Some of this is going to wait until my telescoping pole chainsaw arrives – I got a shipping notification in my email this morning. 🙂  I also won’t be going back through this area with the weed trimmer until after I’ve cleaned it out more and cut trunks down to ground level.  I was finding too many rocks, branches, brick and pieces of wire.  I got the cheapest weed trimmer I could find, so I don’t want to wreck it!

At the Easternmost end of this area is a couple of dead spruces.  One of them had thick vines growing out the bottom of it that I had cut, but left hanging.

Today, I pulled them out.

The vines may have started at the base of one tree, but part way up, it spread to the other dead spruce tree (and is likely what killed both of them).

Looks like some kind of triffid!!  Some of it broke off and is still in the tree, but this is most of it.

These are the two dead spruce threes it was attached to.  Funny.  They look MUCH emptier, now that the triffid vine is out.

Oh, my SIL told me about an app called Plant Snap that I downloaded and tested out.  These vines are Virginia Creeper.  It is related to grapes, but their berries are poisonous to humans (birds can eat them), and the sap can be an irritant.  Because they spread through rhizomes so aggressively, it looks like the only way to permanently get rid of them is with some Roundup.  Which I plan to use elsewhere, at some point, so that works out.  I’m told that spruces are impervious to Roundup, but clearly not to these vines!

This is what the area looks like now.

Later today, I plan to work on that north row.  After that, this section will be pretty much done, other than what is waiting for a chain saw.

Here is the pile of what 1 1/2 hours of cleaning and clearing trees looks like, including the vines.

Yeah.  Wood chipper.

The Re-Farmer