vines

Clean up: dead spruce, so far

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It was too dark to take progress photos last night, so this is how the dead spruce tree I took down looked when I was done for the day.

When I get back to it later today, I’ll be using the mini chainsaw (cordless pruner) to finish de-branching it. Depending on how things go today, I might even be able to break the trunk down more with the electric chainsaw. I’ll have to watch myself, though. My body is already warning me not to overdo it. Power tools will help with that, at least, but it was quite painful getting up this morning. :-(

This is the larger of the vine pieces that were still wrapped around the trunk.

After fighting off the Virginia Creeper since we moved out here, it actually stuns me when I go into garden centres and see it for sale. People actually pay money for this invasive plant! I get that they’re pretty, but my goodness, do they ever kill off anything they wrap themselves around! I’m still pulling it from areas I cleared two summers ago. Any little root left in the soil will keep trying to sprout.

Speaking of invasive, you can see in the background of the above photo, how the chokecherry tree is trying to spread! Gotta get that under control, too!

The Re-Farmer

Settling in, little by little

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I did my rounds around the yard this evening, and it’s really something to see how everything is settling in for the winter.

While I have been fighting those invasive vines all over the place all summer, there is one area where I am keeping them.  They are, after all, quite pretty, when under control!  They have gone to seed, now, and are all covered with lovely little puffs.

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I spent some time going around the yard, picking up the fallen branches, and going through where I cleaned things up in the maple grove.

When talking to my family about what I was finding, I mentioned the rows of trees that were planted too close together, with many dying because of it, and how I wanted to eventually transplant the three poor little tamarack trees.  One family member told me to just cut them down to give the other trees space.

Nope!  Not going to do that.  I really want to save these trees.

This is one of the reasons why.

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They turn a most glorious golden yellow in the fall!

In the future, I would really love to plant more of them!

It’s not unusual, when I make my way through the yard, for me to have a cat follow me.  That’s typically when Rolando Moon makes an appearance.  Otherwise, it’s Beep Beep or Butterscotch.

Today, I had two cats following me!

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Beep Beep and her boy!

Later, my younger daughter helped me move some leaf piles onto the flower garden by the Old Kitchen.  The girls have been raking the grass, but with the latest drop of leaves, it’s rather yard to tell in some places! :-D  We are starting to use the leaves as mulch in different areas as well as adding more to the garden – and that’s without doing any raking at all in between the trees!  Those will be left to decompose where they are.  We’ll just stay on top of picking up fallen branches in those areas.

Earlier today, we made a trip into town to get some prescription refills.  When they were ready, the pharmacist went through the three bottles with me.  There was supposed to be four, however.  So she went back to check what happened.  It turned out that, for some reason, the insurance wasn’t coming up to cover that one at all.  They figured it was a glitch in the system.

They ended up giving me the refill, without charging us for it now.  When I come back in about a week, for some other refills, they will charge us for it then.

Which kinda blows me away.

When we had issues with insurance, shortly after moving here, the Costco pharmacy my husband had set up with wanted to charge him full price. We didn’t even know there was a problem until they wanted some $400, when we should only have been paying $40 or so.  It was a most frustrating experience, and my husband went without some of his medications for a long time before the mess was fixed – and then even longer, because the fix put him at the wrong rate, which meant we still couldn’t afford it.

I’m rather glad we are with this pharmacy, now!

One of the benefits of going with a small town pharmacy, instead of one in the city!

Something to be thankful for, for sure!

The Re-Farmer

Pretty, but …

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With autumn making itself felt for a little while now, the changes in the leafs is sometimes showing us things we couldn’t see when all was green.

Like this beautiful splash of red.

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This spruce tree is probably 50-60 feet high, and entangled in the beautiful, horrible, invasive vine I’ve been digging up and tearing out all over the place.  It looks so gorgeous, but from some of the trees I’ve found, is probably killing the spruce it is climbing.  Whether or not it is why this spruce has branches only on the south and east sides of the trunk, I can’t say.

We’ve lost a lot of spruces in the spruce grove already.  When I get to clearing in there next year, I will hopefully be able to cut the vine at its base – no chance of being able to get it off the tree without special equipment, but I’ll pull down as much as I can.  Who knows.  It might end up like the dead spruces on the north side of the house, and come right off as one giant triffid.

Once things are cleared and cleaned more in there, I will likely transplant new spruces into the spruce grove.  Like the two my mom planted right against the chain link fence around the inner yard! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Die! Die! Die, already!!!

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It’s amazing how quickly we went from “gee, that’s a pretty vine!” to, “this in an incredibly invasive plant that needs to DIEDIEDIE!!!!”

Case in point.

I went to clear the vines that had grown back in the tire planter under my mother’s Mary statue, as it was quickly being overtaken again.

I ended up pulling out this.

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The greenery also includes some suckers growing outside the tire planter, out of the base of a tree I had cut back in the spring.

Those rhizomes?

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They are almost all from under the lip of the tire, where they have worked their way around and around in ropy masses.  The two spots where the tire lip is deformed is where the bulk of the vines were growing out of.

I did not get all of it out, by any stretch.

To the left, inside the tire, you can see lots of little white dots.  Those are ant eggs.  I disrupted a nest in the process, and tiny red ants were scurrying around, trying to pick up the eggs that had come out with the rhizomes.

20180719.tire.planter.behind

The area behind was also filled with new, viny invaders.  I wasn’t able to get any rhizomes out, though.

I think the only way I’m going to be able to reclaim this area it so either use some glyphosate (from my research, the only thing that will reliably kill this vine), which I might do in the short term, or remove all the dirt, take out the rhizomes, and burn them.

Long term, that’s what I’ll likely do, since I want to get rid of the tire planter completely.

On a more pleasant note;

I have seen one of Butterscotch’s kittens today.  It looks like she moved them to the area behind the old dog house, where the firewood pile used to be.  My younger daughter and I had been talking about them and came up with tentative names.  The orange ones are Flooftus and Pooftus, and the calicos are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

And we will never know which is which. ;-)

The Re-Farmer