(Especially at home in the middle of the day.)
So it wasn’t my best plan ever, to start the writing at 8:00 pm on a day when I spent hours outside in 90 degree heat trimming the black locust tree suckers that were sprouting, and the plum tree suckers that were sprouting, and the obnoxious hedgeparsleys (aka the ferny Velcro weeds) that were sprouting.
So much sprouting.
So many suckers.
Of course, the invasive blackberry vines were sprouting, too. The nice thing about those is that they seem to pull up more easily a few months after an initial clearing. They lose some of their oompapa. And the blackberry vines that were buried under a couple of feet of leaves? The ones close to the street, where a few truckloads of leaves were dumped last fall? Those guys are pretty much smothered. They valiantly are trying to push up through the leaf piles, to reassert their dominance, because they are used to being the rulers of everything around here. They’ve been the boss plants for generations, have taken over an entire corner of the property, but what they don’t know is that things have changed, that their end is near. Because now it’s easy to grab them and get them up by their roots.
Possibly this makes me a little too happy.
So today I gathered suckers and vines and downed branches and biggish sticks and added all of these to the piles alongside the road, the piles that were started a few weeks ago when a crew came through and trimmed our overgrown trees. My landscaping friend is coming tomorrow with a chipper. That is one powerful piece of machinery. It will turn the mountains of branches into a few piles of chips. I probably spent too long outside earlier, but the fact that a chipper is arriving tomorrow gave me a lot of incentive. Anything on the side of the road will be turned into beautiful mulch. I don’t think that you can ever have too much mulch.
Before the chipping. Just one of many piles of branches and sticks on the side of the road.
