eor | berries and life

The last two days I've been pushing hard on the yard work. For some reason, late on Sunday, I decided to take on a chunk of yard that had hanging dead limbs, dead wild rose vines, some other live crawling vine, and blackberry canes. In all this, I wanted to save the blackberry vines because blackberries=food and any plant that equals food stays. Sunday was spent pulling dead wild rose vines out of the tree and hacking them up into smaller pieces. The largest of these vines was big and well attached enough that I was able to do a tarzan on it and it didn't move at all.

Last night I tried to clear a little space, pile up debris, and make some of the area look semi finished. That cost me thorn holes all over my hands, through the light gloves I had on. This evening I tried to beat back the live climbing vine enough to free the tree, the blackberries and some large expanses of ground. Freeing a blackberry cane from a crawling vine is an activity which has only long term reward and short term punishments.

An extra punishment, yesterday I managed to stick a stalk of grass into my eye. No eyelid. Eye. The little seed bits scraped my eyeball, I could barely open it this morning. It has gotten better as the day has gone on, so I don't think it'll require a trip to the doctor, but I really wanted a pirate eyepatch this morning.

I found the second ground hog hole today. I found the first one on Sunday with my ankle. This one I only looked at, I didn't drop in for a visit.

At the end of my work each night I pick the ripe blackberries for

derien. Sunday night there were only four or five, but the last two nights it's been a dozen or more small berries. There might be some raspberries at the far end of the patch that's out back. I'll have to remember to check them next time I'm picking. They look very bright red and I just assumed they were underripe blackberries, but they might be raspberries. The canes all look the same to me, pointy things with pointy things on them. :)

I've also been working on finishing up the weeding, but after doing a boatload of it on Sunday, my fingers just aren't in the mood. All I have left involves an area with granite gravel. Granite gravel is like a very high quality sandpaper. The thorns are easier to deal with.

Don't I write about the most fascinating things?