Clearing the Jungle

I have a nice little hand saw for cutting limbs and small trees. It can rip through a baseball bat size tree limb in about 30 seconds. Early this morning I took it to the side yard to see how much jungle I could remove. The area has be left to nature for at least 15 years, maybe much longer, overgrown with cherry laurel trees growing at an angle to reach some light, and infested with vines that grown well up into the two big oak trees.

One type of vine is very thick, and maybe it is a tree of some kind because it has branches and is very tough, but it grows in all directions, and I never noticed before today that these things have grown up 30 or 40 feet into the oaks, and they refuse to be pulled out. What the heck are those things?



After a few hours of hand sawing, I decided it was time for the neighbors to wake up, and I brought out my big chain saw and now I have a pile of brush about 4 feet deep, 80 feet wide and 80 feet long. The two citrus trees that finally died are also gone now. I've left all the stumps up to about 5 or 6 feet because, as I recently discovered, this makes them easier to remove.


Then a break for lunch, and then I spent 3 hours of moving brush to the curb, until the heat would not allow me to walk another step, and I only got a small part of the yard cleared out. I have enough limbs and brush remaining to line the entire street in front of the house. But not today.

Now we can see one neighbor's garage and the other's guest house. Oh well.


Next: Removing stumps