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Donnie has a small creek running through his front yard, and nonnative and invasive Chinese Privet sprouts up each year trying to take over part of the creek bank. The privet is hard to pull up by hand and cutting it off at the base just causes it to send out extra sprouts and be even harder to pull up the following year. Plus, even if you do get rid of it birds eat the berries in other locations like a nearby park and then end up reseeding the yard when they visit. Since it was a semi cloudy 70 degree day yesterday, Donnie decided to do his yearly spring cleaning of the plants before the summer heat and bugs got any worse. He had two new tools this year. One is a handy little Brush Grubber tool that we stumbled upon on a recent trip to Northern Hydraulics. It does a great job on first year up to 1" pieces of privet and small trees. The other was a wire rope and pulley system using a tree and a trailer hitch on his GMC Envoy. Several large clumps previously cut off at the ground and regrown privet bushes were yanked up roots and all. Some roots may have been left behind, but this technique made a big dent in the above ground growth and overall root system. Some maintenance work each spring and fall should keep the privet out of the yard!
Here's a video showing a large clump of privet being yanked out of the ground by the GMC.
Video
Here's a collage showing the problem area, a root of a large pulled up clump, the Handy Grubber at work, and the big pile of pulled up plants after several hours of work. And of course a nice shot of Donnie in his gear designed to avoid mosquito bites and ticks and protect his skin from abrasions. Of course, I'm still not allowed to lift anything over 5lbs. post surgery, so mostly I was providing company and fetching water and some light tools. Oh, and I was taking pictures too:-)
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I really like that Donnie avoids the use of chemicals in his yard and encourages native plants to flourish! He leaves ferns, and I've never posted a fern shot for my daily, so I thought today would be a good day. There are at least 5 distinct types of ferns in his yard. The daily shot shows at least two of them. The tree trunk behind them is a huge sweet gum...one of the trees the bluebirds in his yard love to perch on. (Oh, the bluebird box in my yard has 4 eggs!)
One of the insects I studied and photographed was this Ebony Jewelwing damselfly.
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I also saw this cool fly. I'm pushing the 140 times digitial zoom on the Canon SX40 HS in this shot. Lower light, higher ISO, and handheld took away a bit of the clarity. Still kindof neat I think.
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From the school run yesterday morning...
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Finally took a few pics at one of Joey's games where we were in the 3rd base dugout. Doesn't lend well to up at bat shots, but I got some shots of our defense on the field. I used the continuous shooting mode on the Canon SX40 HS, and I'd have to say that I was happy with the images captured.
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