Shrubbery

Hoped to bottle the Tongue Splitter yesterday, but I decided to do some gardening first.

I planted some Trumpet Vine along fence on one side of the house, next too the garden. After 5 or 6 years, it was so thick it needed frequent trimming to get to the garden. Nava and I started a taking it out a month ago, and clipping it into "salad" (Nava's term) to maximize how much we could get in the lawn recycling tote.

We got about half done over 2 weekends, so I decided to do some more yesterday, when I realized that we didn't need to make salad out of all of it, but could also bundle it, and they would also pick it up.

That saved the effort of cutting every branch into small bits, but now I had to bundle it. Process was separate a 3-4' section of vine on the fence by using the hand clippers and electric trimmer cut any branches crossing the edge. Get a bit of rope around it, tighten the rope, and drag the pile onto the front lawn, where I had room to work with it. Wrap rope around more, tighten, tighten, tighten - need to get it down to a 1' diameter. Cut in half to meet 4' length requirement. Tighten rope again, wrap crappy jute twine around the bundle, 2-3 places, about 20 times (as it break it you sneeze at it). Repeat for 2nd half. Repeat for next 3-4' section of vine, and the next.

Almost 4 hours later, the Trumpet Vine was out, the green tote full, and 6 bundles ready to go. If I had to do this again, I'd think about getting a renting a Wood Chipper, like CherkyB has (well, maybe one that doesn't jam all the time :). Or at least invent some contraption to make the bundling / tightening process go faster.

But, I had a nice morning, out in the sun, got some exercise, and got good and tired. And, in retrospect, if I had known it was this tough to get rid of the Shrub, I would have never allowed it to get established. But that's just the liberal in me talking.