I enjoy showing the lovely blooming madness of my backyard. Although, like a quilt, a garden tends to show the successful stitches and not all the ripped out seams. And that is what I have been doing, ripping seams. Except in the garden sense, the seams are English Ivy.
If I step back further from the happy part of the backyard, the remnants of the evil ivy is revealed. The leaves were removed with a weed whacker. And I cleared the front area just by pulling it up...not a gratifying strategy. Now I have moved to the rolling method, where working from the back by the fence, I'm rolling up the ivy like a carpet.
I have been on an ivy eradication program as well. The stuff is evil! The front yard is pretty well clean of it, though I spy little offshoots trying to reestablish ground. The roots are often hard to dig up, but so satisfying when you rip it up!
ReplyDeleteIvy eradication is a worthy goal, and so difficult to accomplish. There are crews of volunteers trying to eradicate it from certain parks around town. I blame the birds.
ReplyDeleteGood luck, hope you can get rid of the ivy so you can plant something nice, your flowering shrubs are lovely!
ReplyDeleteThe English ivy is so pretty, but invasive. I have had to pull up some ivy too, but luckily it was a relatively small amount around the hosta.
ReplyDeleteI feel your pain! When we moved into our house, we had to remove an ivy-covered fence that bordered two sides of the backyard. It had also climbed a sumac tree, morphed into tree ivy and killed the tree. We got it all removed and replaced with a vinyl fence on one border, and discovered another two feet of property bordered by the gray masonry wall on the south. And our apricot tree soon replaced the dead sumac. When a place has good bones, it’s worth the investment of backbreaking labor. And than goodness our backbreaking labor was when I was 15 years younger. PS - I still have to pull and try to kill the damn ivy that is always encroaching from little nooks and crannies!
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