The beginning of the battle of the burrs

The day was glorious. It was warm and sunny, and everyone could be outside without a coat. That's pretty unheard of for the end of February. Certainly rare enough that I cancelled school so that everyone could spend the day outside... which they did. The most exciting event of the day was probably G. learning to ride a bike. Since it took her all of 15 or 20 minutes to figure out once she decided she wanted to, I think she was ready. Until today, she was pretty dead-set against every learning to ride a bike, so we just let it go. She knew when she was ready, and then just figured it out. There is probably a good metaphor for learning in general in there, but I'm too tired to work terribly hard at sorting it out.

And why am I so tired? Well, I spent nearly four hours in my initial campaign against the burr plants and just general overgrown-ness of our property. All around the edges of most of it, there were tall grasses and burrs and weeds growing, but because they had gotten such a foothold by the time we moved in, we just let them continue growing. There was plenty else to keep us occupied at the time. I had always planned on doing something about them as soon as I could this spring. With the warm weather today, it was my first chance.

Here are some pictures of what we are dealing with.

There really is a tree in there somewhere!

This is an apple tree that has pretty tasty apples, but was pretty overgrown.

H. and TM were big helps, so between the three of us, we trimmed and pulled and carted away much overgrown grass, weeds, burrs, and branches. Here is what we ended up with.

The apple tree (this was just trimming out the suckers and pulling off the vine that had wrapped itself all around the tree)

The is the tree you couldn't see at all in the first picture.

I don't know about you, but I find this terribly satisfying. Well, until I look at what we have left...