Fixettwell Farmlet: Wintertime “Fun” at Fixettwell Farmlet: Attack of the Air Potatoes!

While Bea was having such a great time with her crop-planning, I had a different idea of what constitutes fun. I decided to get outside and attack some brush!

When we moved our first load of stuff down here back in October, Bea & I took a walk through the back yard, day-dreaming about where we might site all her various garden infrastructure. She quickly determined that pretty much every plant growing back past our south lawn was an invasive species of some kind or another, and that if we wanted to stop these plants from spreading up into the useable section of our yard we would need to apply some major brute force. Bea also has some half-baked idea about growing shitake mushrooms back in the woods, some day once we can actually walk into them.

Fast forward to mid-November and we finally got some decent photos that we could use to try to ID these invasive plants and figure out the best way to remove them. We’re not weed experts by any stretch, so please correct us if we’re wrong! Here’s our best guesses:

Blunt-leaved privet:

Japanese Honeysuckle:

Saw Greenbriar (Smilax):

Air Potatoes, aka Chinese Yams:

Still not sure yet:

The Process

My first tactic was to take loppers and cut everything off about waist height. For the privet, this left stumps that we could use to pull them up from the roots. For the vines, this at least gave me something fun to swing from while trying to pull them down from the treetops!

Step two of this plan was to take our fancy new Brush Grubber chains and attach them to our lawn tractor. This tactic was highly successful at tearing up grass, but a complete failure to pull out any brush. Note to self: lawn tractors are really only for cutting lawns.

Next tactic: find a clearance sale on cheap come-alongs and buy one, plus a tree strap. Wrap the tree strap around (you guessed it) a tree and then voila – two long minutes of cranking to pull out a middling stump clump!

Several stumps and one very tired arm later, at Bea’s urging we proceeded to our next tactic: purchase a clearance sale electric winch. We asked advice from a store employee, who looked at us like we were insane to try and take out shrub stumps with this product, despite the fact the box clearly showed the winch hooked up to a huge old tree stump. The employee simply said, “Well, I can’t really say I could recommend that idea. If it breaks loose, it could kill you.” Undeterred, we ended up back at home with this winch. Here’s how it went:

Our weakly winch could only pull the smallest of clumps, and it still took way more time than when Bea just dug the puny ones out with a shovel. When we tried hooking it up to a larger stump, the winch started smoking and soon shut itself off. Apparently the photo on the box only showed the winch hooked up to the tree stump, not actually removing it from the ground.

Next we tried hooking up the hitch on our cargo van directly to the brush grubber chains. We made some really nice tire tracks in the lawn and in fact got the van stuck in the ensuing mud ruts for a good long while; apparently vans aren’t meant to be used as tractors either.

Chris barely visible through our privet disaster

So many invasives!

Tangled mess...

Bea asked some friends who are well-versed in invasive weed removal and they pretty unanimously suggested getting goats. While that might be in the cards for the future, we were hoping to make a decent dent in the brush removal project this year before everything leafs out in spring. Plus the privet clusters are over 8’ tall, so the shorty goats we plan to get won’t be much use on the plants that are already established! (It’s also been said that privet-fed goats make poisonous milk!)

Somewhere along the line of researching the price of replacing the weak winch with a better one, we came across an amazing product: the snatch block! This little device will double your pulling power, and hopefully either give our electric winch enough power to be an effective member of the team, or save my right arm from endless amounts of cranking. However, by the time we placed our order apparently this product is now back-ordered so we’ve been waiting for it to ship.

The right tools make any job easier!

So meanwhile, I’m back to my original tactic: cutting and pulling by hand. After a couple weeks of lopping, Bea’s grandpa’s ancient loppers finally gave out and I had to turn to alternate tools. Bea found an old hatchet under the seat of her truck (kept for those emergencies when, you know, you find yourself alone in the wilderness and only have a hatchet) – this was helpful at cutting some of the larger vines. She also turned up her grandpa’s machete which is a lot of fun to wield against the smaller vines. And today we finally replaced the broken loppers with some compound bypass loppers – way nicer to use on the thicker privet branches.

Overall, I have to say, manual brush removal is a great form of stress relief and exercise. To paraphrase Thoreau: the brush will warm me twice – once when I clear it and once when I burn it.