Monday, May 04, 2009

Poison ivy

I spent a while this morning chopping out poison ivy at the rear of our new property.

Some of the vines were thicker than my wrist.

See all those luxuriant leaves up in the tree? Uhhh, it's a pine tree. Those are ALL poison ivy leaves.

Ahhh, much better. I only chopped out the vines and leaves to head-height, the rest of it is going to have to die on the tree because it's too high to pull down. Notice I also chopped through some miserable stinking English ivy on the shed in the background too.

4 comments:

Lesser is More said...

The never ending battle with ivy rages on. I just finished a battle a couple weeks ago with 10 years of ivy growth that was left along to spread at the townhome we recently purchased (a foreclosure). Armed with a pair of shears and heavy duty gloves I went to town on the roots for a good 5 hours. In the end, there were about 20 trash bags of roots and once ivy free fence.

Just be sure to check back in a couple weeks in case any new growth decides to come back.

jbmmommy said...

Ivy in any form is something I detest. After it grew through the walls of the garage in our first home I never want to see it again.

Herself, the GeekGirl said...

So how did you get rid of it? I'm just curious, because I heard you can't even burn it because the smoke just carries the poison and deposites it elsewhere.
(Here in NM, we don't have poison ivy. We jsut have poison snakes, toads, salamanders, spiders, and sometimes, ground water.)

Andrew Harrison said...

We live next to a small section of woods, and I launched into clearing out this huge network of vines, only to find out later (after the itching) that it was poison ivy. The huge old vines are incredible! I though poison ivy was a little plant! Wow. Fascinating.