This past Sunday, we started the attack on the ivy once again. It covers the back of both sides of the barn, and unfortunately has worked it’s well under the gutters and up onto the roof. We’re talking about hiring someone to get up on the roof and take the stuff down, but at least if we sever the arteries at the bottom, it will stop growing until we can figure out how to get it off completely. At least the roof is fairly flat there – not something I can say about the roof anywhere else around here.

We started at about 10am because there’s no sun on the back wall that early in the morning. And since it was quickly climbing into the 90s that day, we wanted to move quickly to avoid heat stroke! 😉

Three hours later, we’d made really good progress. Most of the small vines were down and we were basically just working on getting the HUGE vines off – some of which are larger than our arms.

This is actually one of the smaller vines. I’m not kidding when I say some of them are about 4 inches across. I have no idea how we’re going to get them all off. Ivy grows like an alien being if you ask me. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Our strategy was basically pull off the leaves and small vines (using hands and a steel rake), then cut and pry from the wall where needed. Sometimes we’d end up with big chunks of ivy in our hands, but most of the time it was just little pieces here and there. Ivy is fairly brittle so when you’re working with it, it breaks off long before you’re ready. Some vines you can just pull and pull, but not this stuff.

Mackenzie helped us out for the last hour or so. She seemed to find our struggle with the vines pretty funny.

To take our minds off all the work still left to be done back here, we bought ourselves some garden art. It was marked way down at Dehner garden center and we thought it might be nice to have something fun to look at instead of depressing. This little cat and mouse rocks back and forth which we’ve put up in our strawberry bed.

And although it’s looking quite rustic already, this is what the sun looked like new. We thought the glass orb in the middle was really cool.

This weekend we hope to get the rest of the ivy off that side and take it to the dump. Our neighbor has offered his tractor and wagon to us which should make it MUCH easier to dispose of. Hauling all that junk through the barn to a trash container just sucks, especially since you lose tons of it along the way.