Out, out damned ivy

Yesterday on a whim—and because the internet clearly knows all—I Googled how to get rid of English ivy. Wow. I am not the only person who dislikes the stuff. In fact, I have a lot of company*.

While I like the idea of ground cover, and I’ve even put in ivy before myself (in a small space that was pretty contained), I’ve always known it’s incredibly invasive. Our yard has ivy up near the house and along at least two of our three fence lines and unfortunately, the ivy keeps trying to grow up under the siding. That’s not good at all.

A couple of weekends ago, I spent a few hours outside pulling up the ivy. Other than having very sore hands and very nearly tweaking my back, it didn’t seem like I made much progress. I didn’t know if that just how it goes with ivy removal, but after reading I realized nope, that’s just how it goes. One blog post I found said on average it took her two hours to remove two linear feet of ivy from her seven foot tall fence. Yikes. So I’ve reframed my expectations for ivy eradication and now hope to have it mostly gone by the end of summer.

I say mostly because another site said you have to stay on the removal process. It takes less time in succeeding years (yay) but you do have to be vigilant. So next year, we’ll need to get on the slash and burn before the rest of the plants grow in.

*In case you’re curious, my favorite site for ivy removal was called Ivy Out – Rip It Out.

How does your garden grow?

I think we’re about 2/3 of the way through our growing season here in Boston so I thought I’d give you the garden score. You may recall that my crazy optimist husband planted peppers, lettuce, cilantro and cherry tomatoes along with our usual basil, mint, rosemary and oregano.

Here are the results so far:

Cilantro: fail

The cilantro plant didn’t die but of course we cut the leaves to use in cooking. And they didn’t come back, nor did the seeds he planted do much beyond barely sprouting. This is the third yard and second climate in which we’ve tried and failed to grow cilantro.

Peppers: moderately good results

We have two tiny peppers on the jalepeno plant and one on the pablano chili plant. They aren’t very big but they’re there and I can see us harvesting them sometime in August or maybe September.

Cherry tomatoes: decent results

We have probably a dozen little green tomatoes on the plant plus one that’s actually turning red. This result is the most surprising to me because we really don’t get all that much sun for all that long in the patio.

The rest of the herbs: great as usual

It’s still a mystery to me why we can grow basil like crazy but still struggle with cilantro, but that’s the way it is.

It would take a miracle

Behold the power of my crazy optimist husband.

Teeny tiny tomatoes:

Teeny tiny peppers:

Gardeners come forth

Pay no attention to the time captions, I got messed up and had already saved the pictures with the incorrect text. The pictures start at about 10:30 AM and the last one was taken about 1PM. Obviously this is early April so we will get more sun in the patio later this summer, but never all day and never full sun in the entire patio.

What can I grow that we can eat? I have grown basil, thyme, rosemary and some flowers too, although none of the true sun piggies. Impatiens do really well in among the ivy. But I want tomatoes, dammit, or something like that. Is it a hopeless dream? Am I doomed to disappointment and failure?

I am an optimist

I love fresh basil but I hate paying for it at the store. In Kansas City, I had the perfect spot to grow basil—it got plenty of sun and was out of the wind. Growing basil in Boston will be a very different experience and I’m not at all confident we’ll succeed. In the same vein, Kent loves rock roses and those also adore lots of sun. I wouldn’t describe our patio as sunny—we have moss growing freely on the bricks. But I’m willing to try with both plants.

Before Kent and I headed out this morning for errands, I snapped this picture of the boys cuddling on the cat perch. When they do stuff like that, I forget about noisy antics of the night before. Although when we got home this afternoon, I found the flash light from the cabinet under the kitchen sink out on the floor. No doubt Wally needed for something.