i fought the ivy...

(not quite sure who won.)

Back when we lived in the northwest, we spent a couple Earth Day weekends pulling ivy from the local state park - it was an invasive species and it was killing the trees and all that other hippie crap. This year, we inadvertently spent the weekend before Earth Day pulling ivy, this time from our backyard. And this was some serious ivy. Serious. Root balls the size of four pregnant watermelons. Bugs and spiders and snails and mold. And the occasional pool toy from the next door neighbors. Needless to say, it was A LOT of work. Above is the before picture - this was actually taken before we even bought the house, and it's kinda hard to tell, but the ivy had pretty much taken over the whole yard. We now have most of the ivy out, but I'm still sore. We'll see how much comes back next year...

After. It's hard to get a perspective, but that pile is less than half of what we got out.

But we did manage to get in a few tomato and basil plants! And we also found the solution to our yard waste problem - after two months of diligently cramming our yard waste bin full every two weeks, we found out that we can just call up the county and they'll come out and pick up our giant pile free! Why didn't any of our neighbors that gave us crap for the giant pile in our driveway mention that? Did they really think we wanted that there? Whatever. At least it'll ALL be gone next week.