Play day at home

Having most of the day to myself Monday, I started by making a list of things we needed and wanted to do around the house.

As the day warmed up, I finally ventured outside and started piddling around, a little of this and a little of that, like pulling leaves out of the goldfish pond in the back yard.

Then I spotted the line of trees and undergrowth that border the road on the front of our property. We’re trying to encourage those cedar trees because they offer a year-round sight and sound buffer from the highway.

The undergrowth isn’t really a problem for us because we do not need to walk through this area; in fact, it helps isolate our property. The nuisance is the vines growing up the trees, trying to strangle them. For the most part, it is poison ivy, so the vines are nude for the winter and easier to extract from the trees.

“That would be fun,” I thought.

Wearing a jacket, gloves and cap, I plowed into the mess, yanking up a vine by the roots and then pulling it out of the tree.

One by one – and there were plenty – I took great joy in extracting a vine from a tree. It was particularly fun to get the long ones that snaked their ways completely to the top of the tree. Pulling on one of these would eventually lean the top of the tree toward me, releasing even more of the cedar’s aroma, its way of saying thanks.

I spent a couple of hours doing nothing but clearing dormant vines from two cedar trees and one small oak tree, as well as removing some of the vines around them.

Just three trees ... and there are so many more. Is it worth it?

I don’t know if the trees really appreciate it, though I suspect they are happier. It looks nicer, for sure.


FOR THE FUN OF IT

Just a week earlier, Leah and I spent an hour or two clearing out similar problems along the bank on the upper end of the pond. The result was a good-sized area that one can now walk through. We hope it will encourage some of the small trees there to flourish.

If nothing else, our efforts do mean fewer poison ivy plants this summer and that’s a good thing.

Bottom line, though, is it was fun.

I don’t know why, but I’ve always liked clearing land. I don’t mean taking a bulldozer to it but getting rid of undergrowth and opening up an area.

Not that I want to overdo it, either, because I know how important that undergrowth is to a broad array of wildlife. In fact, we intend to leave large sections around the pond untouched; we just want three or four areas where we can get to the water easily.

Glancing back at the to-do list I put together Monday morning, there are productive things I cannot check off.

I need to install the pole for our purple martin house; we want to get the house up before too long. I need to call and schedule the exterminator’s regular visit. Leah wanted me to spread some leaves over her garden bed and there remain a lot of leaves around the house. I still have not gotten an H1N1 inoculation.

On a pretty January day, however, those all took a back seat to wrestling with poison ivy vines wrapped around trees.

And I was right; it was fun.