Not much to report here. I drove the two hours from my home in town back out to the ranch (apple orchard) this afternoon. On arrival I hitched up the trailer and delivered a load of blackberry bushes / poison oak / English ivy to the dump.
Five years back I unwittingly started an ecological disaster - I dumped ivy clippings off the bank into the ravine down behind the orchard. This year I noticed the ivy had taken root and was outgrowing everything - choking the oak tree at the point where I dumped it, and spreading laterally under the 4 - 6 ft cover of blackberry bushes. In another decade it would take over the whole area. I hit it with two applications of Roundup. That had no effect on the ivy but killed everything covering it, revealing strong healthy ivy runners going off in all directions.
Last weekend I started grubbing it out by hand, but since the berry bushes and poison oak were so nasty, I took the backhoe down there and cleared an area larger than a house. I think I reached the end of the underground runners - I hope. I will need to watch that area for a long time and hit whatever grows from the remaining roots.
I took a few photos, and may eventually put them over on NetTractorTalk as a project writeup.
