128 Scout - Day 41: "Grape Vines of Wrath"
This morning I slept in till 9am, then got up and started doing more cleaning in the kitchen. I think/hope I'll be more or less "done" with that project after another session or two. I was pretty dehydrated when I woke up, so I figured that I could rehydrate while washing dishes and things before going outside to continue yardwork.
Around 11am I went out and started sawing/snipping more low hanging branches. I then came across a few more trees with serious grape vine problems. Trying to remove the vines is a royal pain once they've reached a certain size, and seemingly impossible by the time they've formed a cluster that covers almost half of the tree trunk. For one tree that was very badly infested, I used a combination of the polesaw, a sawzall, and a shovel (to pry the vines away from the tree trunk) to loosen a 6" diameter cluster of vines from one of the trees. I tied a tow strap from the car around the cluster and wrapped it around my body to see if I could use my weight to break them free and drag them out of and off the tree, but this had very little success. I then hooked the rope to the Miata just to see if it could do any better, and while I was able to pull the vines free from the trunk up to where the first major branches split off, that was basically the limit and any attempts to pull farther resulting in the back end of the car trying to come off the ground. So... no dice. I'm not sure what I'll be able to do about those vines, if anything.
Eventually I decided that I had done all I could do for vine/branch removal for the day, so I then began to gather and pile up all of the vines and tree branches that I'd removed. Much to my surprise, the new pile I'd made seems to be at least as large as the remnants of the previous gigantic burn pile. Before I called it quits for the night I went ahead and gathered a lot of the loose wood and weeds around the burn pile area and placed them on either the new pile or the more consolidated area of the old burn pile. Hopefully after one or two more burnings I will have it mostly cleared out and then it's just a matter of leveling out the ground (there are some dirt mounds in the pile area, and possibly some large stumps too) and letting the grass grow back.
There are still a few trees that need trimmed (not counting the trees that I plan to cut down or hire a professional to cut down) and I'd still like to remove some more grape vines if I can, but that's going to have to wait for another day. I've done about all I could manage for one day.