Winter

We haven’t had much of a winter till recently with this cold snap. Snow? Our driveway wasn’t plowed once all winter, and March is right around the corner. What does that mean for the spring and summer growing season? Will tiny red Poison Ivy sprouts start popping up early? Will that extra couple of weeks of growing time provide us with a bumper crop of Poison Ivy to harvest this season? Who knows? We can look at the past couple of years though for clues.

Last year we had a lot of snow and it was very cold late in the winter, which delayed our normal May 1st wake up call by only a week. The biggest factor in our season was rain. We had a very wet May and June. All invasives really took off, which left us scrambling to keep up with the demand the rest of the summer. June and July were nice and sunny and then a dry August brought on the typical end-of-season decline a bit more quickly, and just as we had caught up, the season was over. Our post Labor Day invasive season cruised along at a comfortable pace and then an early cold spell closed us down in late October, earlier than the usual mid-November.

So how much Poison Ivy did we harvest in 2015? I can answer that. At the end of every day, each of our Landscape Specialists estimates about how much Poison Ivy they pulled out by weight. And at the end of the year, I tally it all up. In 2015 we pulled out 14,442 lbs of Poison Ivy.

Imagine what 7 tons of Poison Ivy looks like all piled up! Where did it all go? What did we do with it? I’ll save that for another post!