{"id":3443,"date":"2021-07-12T07:51:29","date_gmt":"2021-07-12T15:51:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=3443"},"modified":"2021-07-12T07:51:29","modified_gmt":"2021-07-12T15:51:29","slug":"the-year-of-the-vines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/the-year-of-the-vines\/","title":{"rendered":"The Year of the Vines"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Porcelain<\/a>Gardeners tend to remember days, months and years by certain significant events and conditions.\u00a0 Right now, too many people in the western United States are sweating through The Year of No Rain.\u00a0 Five years ago, many of us who grow hydrangeas in the northeastern part of the country went through a couple of late spring frosts that led to The Year of No Hydrangeas.\u00a0 Not so long ago, vegetable gardeners agonized over The Year of Rotten Tomatoes, when blossom-end rot did a number on backyard tomato production.<\/p>\n

The memories aren\u2019t all bad.\u00a0 About every five or six years, I experience The Year of Gorgeous Roses, when the rain comes at just the right times, the sun is abundant and the Japanese beetles and aphids seem to be nonexistent.\u00a0 The word \u201chalcyon\u201d is made for times like that.<\/p>\n

This year is unquestionably The Year of the Vines in my part of the world.\u00a0 Every day when I take stock of the weeds competing for space in my beds and borders I see them\u2014spiraling tendrils of porcelain berry, wild grape, oriental bittersweet, sweet autumn clematis and poison ivy.\u00a0 My yard is not unique in this respect.\u00a0 On my daily walks I see those same vines springing up in expensively tended spaces as well as neglected areas like railroad rights of way.<\/p>\n

That fact helps to assuage any guilt I might have over my vine-infested property, but it does not make the situation any more bearable.<\/p>\n

Why is this happening?\u00a0 Is it due to COVID, climate change, or some other large-scale event or combination of events?\u00a0 These vines have always been with us, but they are much, much worse this year.\u00a0 Frustration is as rampant as the vines themselves.<\/p>\n

Back in 2006, much was made of a Duke University study that suggested that rising carbon dioxide levels resulted in bigger, more vigorous poison ivy plants with increased levels of urushiol, the chemical compound that causes itchy reactions in many of us.\u00a0 Vigor means that those plants produce more berries, which are then eaten by birds and spread around.\u00a0 Climate change is visiting all gardens, and it is certainly possible that increased carbon dioxide levels have also increased the amount of poison ivy.<\/p>\n

This brings us to a discussion of birds.\u00a0 I am an organic gardener and my yard is very bird-friendly.\u00a0 I glory in the birds\u2019 colors, songs, and nesting habits. But while all of that is going on, they also eat and excrete steadily.\u00a0 All of the troublesome vines produce berries in abundance, and many of those berries are undoubtedly \u201cplanted\u201d by my backyard birds in the course of doing their business.\u00a0 I would never do anything to diminish the bird population, so the unintended consequences of that \u201cbusiness\u201d are bound to keep happening.<\/p>\n

I have gotten used to pulling up the oak and chestnut seedlings resulting from \u201csquirrel landscaping\u201d, and I like birds a lot more than I like squirrels.\u00a0 Some amount of tolerance may be necessary.<\/p>\n

Rich garden soil also helps the vines, which love to insinuate themselves in large established clumps of plants like iris and aster.\u00a0 The clumps hide the young vines until they get so big that they scale the desirable plants\u2019 tallest stems and emerge to wave above them.\u00a0 At that point it is much harder to disentangle the vines from the ornamentals and ferret out the vines\u2019 roots.<\/p>\n

So what is the solution?\u00a0 The easiest way is make sure that those vines do not live long enough to produce berries.\u00a0 That means vigilance, because all of them grow rapidly.\u00a0 Get to know the leaves.\u00a0 Wild grape leaves look like smaller versions of domestic grape leaves.\u00a0 Porcelain berry leaves look like deeply dissected grape leaves\u2014and are rather attractive when all is said and done.\u00a0 Oriental bittersweet has medium-size rounded leaves and sweet autumn clematis features leaves that resemble elongated hearts on particularly sturdy vines.\u00a0 Everyone should be able to identify poison ivy, but remember that if you see a vine with three-leafed clusters, stay away.\u00a0 Think of the mnemonic that many of us learned as children\u2014\u201cleaves three, let them be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wear gloves when you pull out any of the vines, but be especially careful of poison ivy.<\/p>\n

Some plant vendors actually sell porcelain berry or Ampelopsis glandulosa var. brevipeduncularis, as well as sweet autumn clematis, known botanically as Clematis terniflora.\u00a0 Bittersweet is also available, especially for fall decorations.\u00a0 Celastus orbiculatus is its Latin name.\u00a0 Don\u2019t grow it or use it.\u00a0 If you want to grow something similarly showy for fall, choose American bittersweet or Celastus scandens.\u00a0 It is less invasive.<\/p>\n

Of course, even if you nip all the invasive vines on your property before they produce fruit, you are still going to contend with them next year.\u00a0 Birds do not observe property lines, after all.\u00a0 The seeds have a propensity for landing in hedges, especially those that are only fittingly tended and not well mulched.\u00a0 By the time hedge owners recognize the problem, the vines are already out of hand.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t be discouraged by The Year of the Vines, because Nature always hands out compensations.\u00a0 Next year may be The Year of the Giant Pepper Plants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gardeners tend to remember days, months and years by certain significant events and conditions.\u00a0 Right now, too many people in the western United States are sweating through The Year of No Rain.\u00a0 Five years ago, many of us who grow hydrangeas in the northeastern part of the country went through a couple of late spring … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3],"tags":[337,2546,1491,153,2549,2545,2544,336,2547,1488,2548],"class_list":["post-3443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-ampelopsis","tag-celastrus","tag-clematis-terniflora","tag-invasive-vines","tag-noxious-vines","tag-oriental-bittersweet","tag-poison-ivy","tag-porcelain-berry","tag-rhus-radicans","tag-sweet-autumn-clematis","tag-toxicodendron-radicans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3445,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443\/revisions\/3445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}