Spring News: Bittersweet and Landscaping

Every Fall for the past three years, I've battled it out with the bittersweet plants. Rumored to have been introduced to the island by the Navy during WWII, since it grows quickly and thus obscures telephone lines, roads, the like, it has come to take over anything in its path. It snakes up trees and over bushes (including our lovely high bush blueberries that grow throughout our property), and strangles them. It crawls into cracks in a house and plies apart the boards.

I've cut down huge patches of it in the Fall, only to see it just as vibrant in the Spring. Then I used the poison "Round Up" on the leaves. That would kill a certain amount of the bush, but not enough to be economical. And the lobstermen worry the poison leaches into the ocean. Therefore, I now cut the bittersweet to the ground and conservatively paint the cut plant as close to the ground as possible, so the poison goes quickly to the roots. This seems to be working and involves a lot less of the poison.

I also strip the leaves off any shoot I find, since if the plant can't get sunlight, it can't continue to expand. This also works, at least on the young new shoots.

Having cut down a huge swath at the edge of our lawn, there is a lot of burning to do, and then carefully painting just the cut end close to the ground with the "Round Up." My hope is to again have a small bunch of apple trees at the edge of the lawn. There are some old ones that were planted probably in the late 1800s or early 1900s, but they still produce apples that make the best apple pies and apple sauce I've ever had.