Posts Tagged ‘removing vines’
Within Inches
Had a close call with the zero-turn mower when one of the rear wheels started sliding over the edge of a sharp drop near a culvert, and I couldn’t get it to climb back out. Every time I tried to maneuver it back onto flat ground, it felt like I was getting closer to disaster. This happened in a corner of our property near the road that was about as far away as I could get from the shop where I could get the help of the ATV and winch cable to pull the mower back up over that lip.
One thing I try to practice religiously is to stop before I make a problem worse than it already is. I immediately shut off the mower blades and lifted the deck to its highest setting. Getting out of the seat to look at the drop the wheel was caught on, I didn’t think it looked insurmountable. My next move involved muscling the front wheels into alignment to give the mower a straight shot out of the predicament.
One of the front wheels was up in the air, and it felt rather precarious to try sitting back on the seat with the mower tilted on the brink of no return. As soon as my butt landed, I goosed the drive wheels and rolled up onto solid ground again.
It was a real “Phew!” moment.
I was getting to the end of a long day of not just mowing, but multiple other good accomplishments as well. When I took Asher to retrieve the empty feed buckets after breakfast, he wanted to extend it into an adventure walk in our woods. I took advantage of that time to pull many vines off of tree trunks. The ground in the woods beyond the labyrinth is covered with a web of vines that take advantage of almost every tree they encounter.
There are so many vines; it seems like a fruitless attempt to defeat them all, except I noticed it wasn’t as bad as a year ago, so I think we are making progress. Knowing I would have some time between mowing sessions while batteries charged, I pulled the ATV trailer from the hay shed and filled it with composted manure to be spread on the hay field.
The rain of the previous two days kept me from mowing the yards around the house, so I started there first. The grass had definitely responded to the available ground moisture with added inches. While batteries charged after that effort, I started up the Grizzly and hauled two trailer loads of composted manure.
Then it was back to mowing and my close encounter with the drop-off near the culvert. I finished mowing just in time to help Cyndie with afternoon horse chores and found the horses in their calmest and most satisfied state. I gotta say, that’s one of the best ways to end a day filled with non-stop (sometimes anxiety-producing) activities on our land.
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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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