Rumble in the Jungle
I need to spend more time in my backyard. No, really.
Along the back fence of my backyard, itself no bigger than a large postage stamp, grow two large climbing vines attached to frames built into the fence. These vines have been around since the place was built, call it seventeen or so years. I don't water in the back, mostly to save on time and water use, so it is probably a miracle that these vines survive the dry summers. Not only that, but they've flourished. They've flourished a little too much, and become somewhat...messy.
I hate yardwork. Always have.
The result is predictable. The vines grow up, flop over, and the covered leaves die. The vines flower, spiders weave webs through the foliage, and the covered parts turn into a dense, dead thicket of dried vegetable matter, perfect for said spiders. My back wall is an Anasazi cliff dwelling of arachnids. Some of the vines got to the lowest branches of my tree, and they promptly headed for the sky, dragging the branches down with hundreds of pounds of tension. The vines also send out runners along the ground, which tend to pop up in the darndest places, including through the deck, and in the neighbor's yard, and over the other side of the other neighbor's fence.
The other neighbors have got tired of this, and I can't really blame them. But their response wasn't exactly neighborly. Someone went along the top of the fence, and sheared off the supports of the vines on my side of the fence, causing the whole mass to fall forward towards my yard. I've spent the afternoon cutting and pruning the left hand (smaller) vine down to a mere shadow of its former self. There's perhaps 2% left of the original mass, and there's a huge pile of vegetable matter on my deck that needs to be got rid of. I hope it survives to be better pruned in the future. Worse, I need to do the right hand (bigger) vine, and it's probably double the mass of the left hand vine.
On the other hand, I've freed the tree, and it's probably a lot happier about it. No doubt so are my neighbors, as I'm actually doing something about the vines. I'll be happier when it's done, too. Right now the backyard looks rather messy, which is not a nice thing in suburbia. My sole consolation is that my immediate next door neighbors (not the not-so neighborly neighbors) have it even worse. The vines are annoying, but not actually dangerous. They have a thornbush that's gone ape. It's a race between it and the right hand vine to see what vegetable dominates the postage stamps. Since I'm about to rudely interrupt the right hand vine's bid for dominance, I suppose I'll have to ask the neighbors to do something about the thornbush. That will be fun.