Our Earth

Thank you for visiting and welcome to our small piece of Earth, as we can share it on the internets. We've got a lot of ambitions for this year; installing a chicken coop so to obtain and care for some egg-layers {researching advantages, chickens vs ducks}. Also we'd like to build a few or several raised beds to protect our sloping land from further erosion and perhaps this spring we'll finally have our own greenhouse! During the past several months or so, we've been 'assigning' a space for a few bee hives and of course we have a ka-zillion plants we'd love adopt!

January is a rough time to get fotos, but that's how these things go... speaking of ambitions for this year, we're somewhat at war with our local poison ivy since we're both highly allergic. This here is a very old locust tree, I think {because I also think it's dead now} and the fat hair vine looking thing growing up with side is ancient poison ivy. We refer to this as 'a mother hub' since we learned that poison ivy grows endlessly if left unchecked... or insufficiently challenged. I theorize that this 'hub' has sent growth out in various directions, at least 20 feet. We only use poison when there are no other options and Zeffy's  theorizing that if we inject poison into this hub... all it's offshoots will become poisoned as well. This sounded like the perfect plan until we were forced to carefully observe these past several months {unable to act} and learned that birds eat the berries poison ivy will produce. We're discussing allowing it to grow in areas we don't frequent... but who knows how connected it all is?

The vines really choke the growth of some trees and last winter I went on more than one tear to rescue a hedge-apple tree from strangulation. You can see here, this tree is not on the edge of death... but when I cut that vine out, there will likely be a 1-2 inch indentation left behind. One of my unanswered questions has been: does that indentation mean the tree is exposed? As in, can that cause an infection? I wonder if there's a better time of year to remove these choking vines; perhaps while the poison ivy is still dormant so I'm not rewarded with gross rashes.

Forgive our construction phase, kisses from management