The last couple of days have been spent removing some of the remaining European buckthorn trees on the borders of our property.  Most of the trunks are less than 6 or 8 inches in diameter at the base, so it only takes a few seconds to cut them down with a sharp bow saw.  But the hard work is untangling them from each other and the grape vines that tie them together, and then getting them to the brush pile without damaging too much of the friendly vegetation that is taking hold where last-year's invasives were removed.  The trees are probably about at their heaviest right now because of the big clusters of ripe black fruit, which I try not to spread around too much in the process.

I've also been clipping or pulling the thousands of buckthorn seedlings and stump suckers that seem to wait until late summer to start their growth spurt.  The exotic bush honeysuckle that seemed to take so long to remove last year has not been as much of a re-sprouting problem as I thought it would be.  Many of the little honeysuckle shoots that appear in woods can be pulled up with hardly any roots holding them in place.

One of the more ubiquitous plants on the floor of the woods is the strawberry.  It makes a pretty dense groundcover, but I don't know how much of a problem (possible benefit) that is.  I've removed a lot of the plants them because I know I don't want them everywhere, but I'd like to find out how much of a problem they are considered to be be in a wooded area, and the best method for getting rid of them.

The only plant that I go out of my way to use herbicides on is poison ivy.  I have a pretty bad reaction to it, so (even though it's a pretty little native) I want to get rid of it as fast as possible.  The other unwanted plants I can keep pulling or hacking at for as long as it takes.

The last post to my blog Honeysuckle Haven of Hell's Half Acre was June 18 when got too busy with outdoor things to report on those things, and my backlog of photographs of friendly native and alien invasive vegetation got too big to ever post a way consistent with the way I had been posting them.  In any case, I've never much liked the name of that blog, and it no longer describes our own backyard, since there's little trace of honeysuckle left.  And, of course, it's far from being hell.  It's also quite a bit more than a half acre, especially considering that I'm being both literal and figurative in my use of the word backyard.

I was surprised that the new name didn't show up intact in a Google search, so I grabbed it.  It better describes what I've been doing in our yard since the bulk of the invasives have been relegated to the brush pile.