The Sky Vine is the Limit...

It's that time of year when it's difficult to blog about my garden. I am plenty busy, but don't yet have much to show for it. Well, that's not quite the truth. I have sore muscles, poison ivy rash on my forearms, and huge bags of garden refuse my husband has to deal with.

One thing I've been doing is moving vines. Crazy big vines. I'd planted a sky vine four years ago to a side of our house that was too close to the neighbors' house. At the time we hadn't closed in that part of the porch and I needed a rampant vine to give us some privacy. It did the job beautifully. We decided two years later to close in that part of our porch and turn it into a laundry room. I thought the vine would be happy on the existing lattice support, but within a year, parts of it were creeping inside the laundry room. We live on ten foot pilings, so it was working its way inside the house through the floors, and creeping around beneath the house. It also kept itself busy warping the lattice, and eventually popped it out of its support. This wandering vine was getting aggressive, and downright creepy.

It's a tropical vine, so it was completely flattened by the harsh winter. It's still dormant right now, so while the beast slept, we dug it out of the ground--a tuber the size of a man's leg. It's buried on the north end of our property where it can harass the chain link fence, and eventually, probably small dogs and neighbors too.

Meanwhile, it took a bag of dirt to fill the hole it left, and I've replaced it with Mexican petunias. They will fill in the empty spot in no time.