Posts Tagged ‘grape vines’
Summer Remnants
The end is near. The scenery is reflecting the change of seasons in a variety of places around our property. The trumpet vine sprouted one last blossom that stands out like an emphatic exclamation.
There is evidence of fruit on one of our grape vines. I fear we may have waited too long to harvest.
The spell of abnormal heat is predicted to break tomorrow, with a hint of possibility we could get a little precipitation this afternoon to help usher in the change. Any moisture will be welcome because the earth around here is much drier than our trees deserve.
Could a cold and wet October await? That would be a wonderful surprise at this point. It is time for the remnants of summer to disappear once and for all this year. That was then. This is now.
We Northlanders get a little flummoxed when the weather here stays “San Diego nice” for too long without interruption.
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Plastic Goats
Sure, we could get goats to control the patches of poison ivy on our land, but we don’t need large swaths eaten down to a moonscape. We want a more targeted approach and one that will cost us less than goats. We are taking a shot at using plastic and/or cardboard to cover specific patches where the problem plant is most entrenched.
The hope is to turn just a select strip into a miniature moonscape. Since this method kills everything beneath the plastic, it’s not different from spraying entire swaths with a solution of vinegar/salt/dish soap concoctions, so we may experiment with that in a different location. Cyndie donned protective gear and worked to cut out the woody stems of poison ivy with berries that are very easily seen right now. She left her good gloves behind with Asher to stand guard.
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The horses came over to see what was up and lingered in the vicinity for a short while, grazing the dead grass and any new sprouts beneath that might be showing up.
I decided to make myself useful and worked to cut out the grapevine stems from the other side of the brush where Cyndie was working.
Anywhere on our property that we don’t regularly walk through is pretty much guaranteed to have grape vines seeking to become the dominant species, bending branches and entire trees down into submission. Trying to keep them at bay could be a full-time job. I yanked as many strands as possible from the branches of the bushes that were being swallowed and made a pile of vines.
I guess we worked for longer than Asher could stay awake.
We’ll wait a growing season and then see if we can encourage a desirable ground cover to fill in areas that have been under our plastic version of leaf-munching goats. The weather patterns of the last two years produced the largest expansion of poison ivy since we’ve lived here. It would be nice if we could make some headway in the other direction this year.
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Vines Again
While walking through the woods yesterday with Cyndie and Asher, we decided to knock down as many of the broken and tipped trees and branches as we could reach and deal with using my pruning saw. Inadvertently, that ended up including freeing up some trees from the grip of vines as we came upon them. For as much energy we have put toward de-vining our trees over the years, it continues to surprise me to find how many we must have overlooked. In addition to that, there are plenty where vines were cut out previously but have resprouted, requiring another round of attempted eradication.
One common vine we have seen many times in the middle of the fully shaded woods grabs a firm hold on the bark and has a very impressive web of roots tangling great lengths across the forest floor.
Out of curiosity, I did some image searches for similar-looking vines on tree trunks, and to my surprise, the most common and repeated match identified it as poison ivy. Oops. Really?
I have a pretty good handle on identifying the three leaves of poison ivy plants and have never seen any greenery on these hairy vines on the trees, so I never connected the two. Also, I have never experienced a rash outbreak after messing with the vines in the woods, which surprises me since I react pretty easily when having contact with the low-growing plants in the sunny expanses around our property.
I consider myself lucky and will be giving these vines in the woods a little more respect when coming across them in the future. I will definitely be looking more closely for signs of the telltale leaves in the woods during the growing season.
Part of the problem probably stems from the fact that we don’t see very far into the thick woods off the trail during the growing season, and there are so many green leaves that we’re less likely to spot poison ivy leaves among all the others. Out on the edges where it grows in the sun, it is very easy to see.
While standing in the middle of a section of the woods off-trail yesterday, I spotted a curious pattern of young hornbeam (also called ironwood) trees that had sprouted around the trunk of a large poplar tree.
I am curious what led to this arrangement. The way the hornbeam trees are growing in something of a circle mimics the pattern of new growth after we cut down a tree, and the energy stored in the roots sends up a ring of new shoots around its circumference. Could something like that have happened here, and the poplar (a much faster-growing tree) just happened to emerge in the middle of them? I don’t really know what else to think, given my lack of education in the intricacies of tree species and their growth. Whatever, it is certainly an interesting sight.
Much more common and easy to identify are the numerous grapevines sprouting up from almost everywhere, but especially from places where we have cut them out before. That plant is VERY good at spouting new life from any fragments left in contact with the ground.
This time of year, before any leaves have sprouted open, is prime time for us to do vine hunting… again.
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Buried Wires
Our search to locate the rusty old barbed wired fence that demarcated the northern border of our property has reached a temporary pause. We made it to the end of one section of visible rusted T-posts and wires, but now the wires disappear beneath years, maybe decades, of eroded soil that makes its way down the slope from a plowed field above.
I tried pulling up on the wires, but they are so old and rusted, especially having been buried for years, they just broke. I ventured ahead, further along our property line to a new section of scrub brush, to find someplace where the wires show up above ground again, hoping to work my way back from the other direction. What I found was a batch of grape vines so thick that it makes the thorny area we had previously been working in seem like a luxury.
On the positive side, it appears we could grow grapes! This vine sure looks fruitful! Maybe if I give it good attention for a few years, pruning and supporting it, I could nurture a harvest-able crop. Fresh squeezed grape juice would be a real treat.
I did also find where the wires come up out of the ground onto another T-post. As I followed the wires into the ground there, I discovered that they can’t be pulled up from this direction because they are now running beneath years of growth of the thick wood shoots of the grape vines.
At this point, my plan is to just run our new fence in a line between the last posts I did locate. 
The property line is supposed to be straight, anyway, so there’s no real mystery as to where the fence should be. And, there is no sense digging up the buried barbed wire, just to get rid of it. In this case, buried wire is the same as no wire at all.
I have also decided that for the remainder of the thick sections in the direction toward the street, we can forego trying to cut away enough brush to put a fence down the middle, and instead, just use the entire mass of trees as our fence. I will trim the branches on our side so they form a clean line, creating the impression of a tall hedge.
That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see if my idea works after I spend many hours and a lot of energy pruning trees to test it out.
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