Personal Note: Staving off triffids

[nebroadwe]

I'm not a gardener. I don't even play one on LiveJournal. But since my condo association appears to have dispensed with landscape maintenance for the duration of the economic emergency, I did a little hack'n'slash weeding this evening on the bits of landscape opposite my front door. Right across the sidewalk there's three or four feet of (theoretically), mulch, ivy, and juniper bushes in front of a chain-link fence separating my building from the backyard jungle of the house next door. Said jungle has produced a friendly mulberry tree that I've been trimming back, but also a completely out-of-control grape vine, some invasive weed-trees, and a gigantic, utterly gross, six-foot-tall, soft-stemmed THING that produces big, ugly green leaves and big, ugly, dangly bunches of dark fruit.

Urgh.

I hacked off every branch of it that was poking through the fence and threw it in the dumpster -- I wish I could have burned it. I also took out the festoons of grape vine that were strangling the juniper bush I could see, and discovered they'd already killed another one. There's no hope of keeping it out of the mulberry tree -- they're both too tall -- but I cut away what I could reach. All of this raised clouds of distressed insects, and I swear the grape vine was trying to grab me by the time I was ready to quit. I probably should have piled up the weed tree corpses where it couldn't see them before I hauled them off to the dumpster.

I didn't have the courage to take on the ivy encroaching on the sidewalk afterwards. Instead, I went upstairs and showered and am seriously considering using the back door for the next few days. How long do plants hold a grudge?

Comments

[malka2009.livejournal.com]

Cue theme from Invasion of the Body Snatchers ...

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

The big ugly dangly bunches of dark fruit? Are they really, really dark purple? And the juice (when you inevitably get it on you) bright magenta? That's poke weed. :D

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

[googles] Yep, that's it all right. Maybe now that I know it's name, I can dismiss it?

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I have three bug bites this morning. At least, they look like bug bites ... [FX theremin]

[nateprentice.livejournal.com]

Go forth and slay those plants!

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I may need some help from your children. :-)

[nateprentice.livejournal.com]

That could be arranged, if you want. Daddy has another RPG day this Saturday...

Nate

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I'm down with that. More park time!

[nateprentice.livejournal.com]

It's a deal, then. Lemme find the times. I think it'll be 9:30-2 or 4.

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

You can. Naming something always calms the terrors. :D

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Throw in some tokens and we can go places, like the Lansdowne Farmers Market. Whee!

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Begone, pokeweed! [checks] Nope, still there.

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

At least the songbirds like it. Of course, then they leave magenta droppings on your car, sidewalk, clothes....

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Eh, I get that already from the mulberries.

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

Mulberries. *shivers*

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Is that a "Mulberries -- yum!" shiver or a "Mulberries -- eww!" shiver?

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

I got tired of them quick in the late '70's/early '80's when Mr. June and Mrs. June (the people who owned the building Dad rented for his shop) had the Mulberry Tree o' Doom, that was at least 30 feet tall and full of berries, which everyone assured me tasted just like blackberries and disappointingly, did not.

...but we had mulberry jelly and jam and pie and wine and....

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

... the Mulberry Tree o' Doom, that was at least 30 feet tall and full of berries, which everyone assured me tasted just like blackberries and disappointingly, did not.

What? Only people with no tastebuds would compare the two. (Blackberries are much tastier.) The real fun of mulberry trees is climbing them; they make excellent cliffs/castles/Anne of Green Gables houses.

My mom tried to scare us off eating mulberries by prophesying appendicitis when one of those little seeds got caught in our appendixes. Oddly enough, this didn't stop us -- normally we were frightened out of our wits by warnings like this.

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

I never found a tree in Florida I could climb, sadly, after having maple and willow and mimosa trees in Indiana where I spent a lot of time (and then the neighbor's pecan tree fell into our pasture and that made the most excellent pirate ship).

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I think a lack of climbable trees in one's young life should be grounds for alleging child abuse, but I'm aware that's a fringe viewpoint. :-) I only realized how lucky I was growing up in cow country after I'd left. At least the backyard jungle reminds me of it. (And a cardinal just flew out of the mulberry tree and landed right on my balcony and stared at me as I typed that, as if to say, "You better believe it!")

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

Well, you could climb the live oaks but that involved ropes, ladders and hammering things into the trees, as the first branches were inevitably fifteen feet off the ground (but sooooo lovely).

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Tall makes up for a lot, as long as you have someone willing to nail up the steps and string the ropes and keep a weather eye on them for damage not visible to childish eyes. We had to cut back one of our mulberries, and we went out afterward to, er, acquire a pallet from a local lumber yard and then nailed it up on the cut-back bits as a platform. That was a ship and an airplane and a castle and stuff for years, even after the tree grew back around it and it became a little difficult to wiggle into it ... [gets all nostalgic]

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

Someone at one of the houses I used to visit in FL had a lovely, lovely treehouse nailed very high up in a tree (I think that sucker was about twenty feet off the ground) with a ladder nailed into the tree to get up there. Since I was quite the cautious climber, even as a kid, I watched kids heavier than me go up said ladder before I attempted it. :P

The willow tree in our back yard when I was a kid had a couple of whippy branches growing out of the bole just under the first branch notch, so I could scale the tree using those whips and get up into the notch. There really wasn't anywhere to go from there, sadly, as the other branches were too far up to reach, but it was a nice, high perch.