Shave and a Haircut

No indoor projects to report on this week.  I blame this guy:

You may recognize him from a post way back in October-- he belongs to our friends.  When they go out of town, we always jump at the chance to host him at our place for a few days.  He's incredibly charming and polite, and seriously-- look at that face.

For obvious reasons I've been hesitant to bust out my painting supplies and attack the ceilings in the hallway, bathroom, and guest bedroom (all of which are shiny and yellow, ugh)-- it's just not good form to get paint in your borrowed poodle's lustrous curls.  And I felt weird about sewing with him underfoot too-- what if I dropped a straight pin and he stepped on it?  Am I just using him as an excuse to be lazy?  Maybe.  He likes couch naps almost as much as I do.

But we have been busy.  As I've mentioned before, our house was a rental for several years before we bought it, and during that time the lawn got a little wild completely insane.  When we first moved in, my dad detached a dying honeysuckle bush that was literally tied to the front of the house.  The following week Ray attacked the nine-foot hedge that had been obscuring the house from the street and ripped out the first of three epic clumps of bamboo that were on the chopping block.  Since then, he's pulled out the other two bamboo blobs, cleaned up the overgrowth on the left-hand side of our driveway, cleared the huge impassable thicket of blackberry bushes on the right-hand side of our house (literally, they were so overgrown that he discovered a five-foot-high metal gate hidden in the middle of them), denuded our massive buckeye tree of the ivy that was strangling it, and removed endless bags of leaves from the property.  Lest you wonder what Ray is doing while I'm fixing the bathroom ceiling, look no further than the yard.  Believe me, he's been busy out there.

Flash forward to today, the rarest of all things-- a sunny-ish Oregon winter day.  This is going to sound crazy, but we thought we had these two enormous trees on the left-hand side of our backyard until we discovered yesterday that they are actually two normal-sized (for the Pacific Northwest, anyway) trees that have been completely taken over by ivy.  Our pest-control man told us that the trees underneath would eventually die because of the resource-stealing ivy, and if they fall, our roof is toast.  Today we decided to hack some of the ivy away and try to figure out what we were working with.  Behold:

 

See all those leaves?  They're not from the tree.  They're from the ivy.  You can see some of the tree's branches popping out of the ivy towards the top.  Yeah, we thought the leaves were part of the tree too.  So if you look carefully you can see Ray in there detaching some of the ivy from the left-hand tree with 1) a hand saw, 2) clippers, and 3) a pry-bar.  The pile of ivy behind him represents half an hour of bushwhacking to get as far in as he is in this photo.  Doesn't LeBaron look concerned?

Here's another view:

Yes.  That is ivy.  Two different species, in fact.

Deep in the ivy thicket, Ray encountered a third (much smaller-- maybe 6" in diameter) tree heavily covered with vines.  It was leaning, so we decided to remove it.  Ray cut it in half, and when he tossed it onto the ivy pile, this is what we saw:

 

I don't know if you can tell this from the photo, but the tree rotted away a long time ago and is completely hollow-- only its bark, held in place by the roots, remains.  The ivy murdered this little guy.

We decided that the best approach would be to cut the ivy off from its ground-roots by cutting a full circle around the tree-trunk (which was not visible because the roots were covering it so thickly).  Here's what it looked like after Ray cut all the way around it-- see the darker, narrower trunk the in center and the lighter gnarly roots lower down and higher up?

The other thing you're seeing in the photo is our fence, or what's left of it.  Like I said, the ivy was so thick that we'd never seen this section of it.  The ivy has actually pulled the fence out of the ground and is pushing it over into our yard.  Hello, Little Shop of Horrors.

Above is a wider shot of the progress.  That dirt-pile behind Ray was once a huge (maybe 10ft high?) bamboo clump that was just randomly in the middle of the yard for no reason at all-- it'll get grass-seeded in a few weeks.  Anyhow, see all those hanging vines to Ray's right?  See the poodle-butt on the left?  Hehehe.

So this is a totally overwhelming project that will probably take one million years to complete (our town offers yard-waste pickup service once a week, so we've been operating on a fill-the-bin-wait-a-week-fill-the-bin schedule to remove our plentiful yard debris), but we're eventually hoping to make the left side of the backyard match the much-more-civil right side:

Yep, we've got a lot of work to do.  And yes, we see the ivy growing up that tree.  We're on top of it.