The House of Good Will?

It's been a year+ since we bought The House of Goodwill, and I've had nothing but love for this amazing place since.  It's been a source of happiness, purpose, and now...pain.  Finally, a year in, The House of Goodwill has done me a bad turn.  A pretty gross one, too.

If $1 chrysanthemum season and $1 poinsettia season are two of my favorite seasons of the year, perhaps my LEAST favorite season is this one: poison ivy season.  And unfortunately, poison ivy season seems to have no time or weather boundaries.  It can pop up any time, kind of like tornado season in Tennessee.

You may recall a post on my new favorite app, the plant identification app called Picture This.

Picture This has led me to the discovery of The House of Goodwill's secret dark side: landscaping full of poison ivy.  Within the last six weeks, I have rapidly become an expert poison ivy identifier, thanks to this helpful app.

Here's a recent screenshot that's an accurate representation of my thread of saved pics in the app, all taken from my yard:

As you can see, 3 out of 4 plants are poison ivy.

Poison ivy was all over the place!

I say "was" because I have spent the last week pulling poison ivy vines out of the ground all through the yard.  Poison ivy was all over in the front of the house, between the shrubs.  And it was all over in the "hillside" on the side of the house.

The worst part?  The lilyturf (or monkey grass, as it's commonly called) is the groundcover that fills in all the landscaped areas around this house.  I have come to hate the lilyturf, because it grows extremely aggressively, is tough to pull out, and seems to be an excellent breeding ground for all kinds of weeds.  There seems to be a square mile of lilyturf in the yard here.

This slope along the driveway (and along the side yard - it gets steeper) is ALL lilyturf.  (And weeds.)

It's in the front of the house, and all along the sides, too:

The poison ivy vines grow down in the monkey grass where you can't see them till they get large.  They like to lurk out of sight beneath the tall turf, awaiting unsuspecting innocent weeders (like me), who have to step into the monkey grass to pull out redbud saplings, etc.

It's just long enough to hide poison ivy perfectly.

So when I discovered poison ivy everywhere this spring, I decided I had to pull it out.  I don't have a choice about pulling weeds out of the landscaping, and I didn't want to do it surrounded by poison ivy.  Plus, if I left it alone, by the end of summer the vines will be even longer, and spread even MORE everywhere.  And my dogs could get in it.

Leaving the vines in place didn't seem to be an option.

So over the course of a week, I filled five big plastic bags with poison ivy vines.  I had hoped to do it in a day, but after pulling the vines for a couple of hours the first day, I didn't get them all.  Every day for the next five days that I toured the landscaping, I'd see more that I missed.

I started pulling the vines on Saturday.  Here's a pic from my main weed-pulling arm on Monday (with sincere apologies for the grossness):

And here is a pic from this morning, Friday:

I think it's MORE uncomfortable than it looks!

The mystery I haven't figured out is how this wasn't a problem last year, as we spent the summer here.  I remember the foster kids throwing their toys deep into the monkey grass, and we'd run in and pull them out.  My husband, son and I spent quite a few days in the fall weeding.  We were all over in the monkey grass (in the same places I pulled poison ivy), yet none of us had it.

As to the monkey grass, it's officially now my arch nemesis #2.  (After the poison ivy, of course.)  I'm sure that it seemed like a great idea for a ground cover forty years ago.  But I hate this stuff!  And I'm trying to figure out how the weeds were managed in it by the former owners.  We spent many afternoons weeding last fall, only to have the landscaping overflowing with them in the spring again.

If it was just weeds, I'd complain less.  But I'm seeing a yearly battle with the poison ivy in my future.

And a side effect of this misadventure: I'm officially poison ivy paranoid.  Now that I can identify it, I see it all over.  Along the road, in every yard - seriously, this stuff is everywhere!  Will I ever be able to relax outdoors again?

My beloved House of Goodwill, did I misname you?

The Project Pit?

Or the Poison Ivy Pit?