Paul Bunyanish

Our back yard is what some would describe as completely overrun by bushes, vines, and other nefarious plants and weeds. The guy that lived in the house before we did tried his best, I think he really did, but he didn't dig deep enough. He cut the vines but he didn't pull them down from the trees. He trimmed some tree limbs, but didn't do a proper job of it. Really, he just didn't really know what he was doing.

So there's a fenced-in area, about fifteen or twenty feet deep, then behind the fence there's another six feet or so and then there's a stone wall that's around four feet tall. Then behind that there's another fifteen or twenty feet, and then what's left of an alley.

The fenced-in area is pretty clear of debris and weeds, the only issue is a huge pine tree that has had free reign over the back yard. The branches were everywhere until my wife did some proper pruning, and now it's more manageable.

The area behind the fence, the little six feet section? Yeah, it's completely filled in with old brush and cuttings from whatever pruning the dude tried to do in years past. So the whole area is about two feet deep of leaves, pine needles, and otherwise carpeting filled with spiders and bugs of all varieties. Scary.

The main source of all the vines that have been strangling the trees in the back yard seems to be coming from around some honeysuckle and mulberry trees, the two species lending themselves greatly to split branches and great highways for the vines to travel up.

One of the trees we decided to cut down yesterday.

It's weird, the amount of sunlight one tree felling can grant you when the space it occupied is no longer occupied. And now we're able to see back into the back-back-back yard, and we've seen things like baseball mitts, broken TVs, old tires, big round bouy things, and all manner of other debris from years forgotten.

We've planned some of this plant removal from before moving in, noticing how completely overrun the area back there truly is. But now that we've actually taken that first step into the great beyond, it's as if the job is just too big. There are just too many vines. The honeysuckle is just too overgrown.

But there's still the remains of the mulberry in the back yard. The eight or so big branches and the hundreds of small branches that are in piles, waiting to dry so we can then burn them all.

And then, perhaps, we can start to cut down another small tree/bush and continue the process until the back-back-back yard is reclaimed.