Poison Oak has Sprung

Spring must truly be here because on the walk to the gate yesterday I saw that beautiful green shiny poison oaks leaves were in evidence. The poison oak makes me think how great it would be to have some goats around the place to eat up the stuff. I wonder if the muscovy ducks would eat it? Probably not. Maybe next year after we enlarge the chicken coop. More fence? The poison oak is lovely, but I hate the rash I get from it. It is bad stuff.

As soon as it stops raining I will take the shovel and trek around

in the woods and dig and chop at the poison oak stems.

I don't expect to kill it, just slow it way down.

I think this oak tree might originally have been a bunch of little trees that grew together. These oaks look so nice with the moss on them, but when they grow like this they collect leaves in their middle and slowly rot and then part of them die and fall over.

Here you can see some of the leaves caught in the middle. I haul the leaves out, but water still collects in the winter and eventually harms the tree.

This tree has had several parts of it die and been cut away. 

The trunk where the bark has come off is pretty much dead and needs to be cut away before it falls on something . The tree that is laying on the ground shows how the oaks will just fall over. I have a neighbor who calls these oaks "weeds" and he removed most of them on his property. 

I would like to clear a lot of the oaks away from the house, but it is very expensive and they are way too tall for us to cut down ourselves. And having the oaks around the house in the summer makes the property soooo much cooler. And I do love how everything looks so green. But then there are the leaves to rake. I'll have to find out if oak leaves are bad for goats. We had a few oak trees when we had goats and when the goats could get a hold of some oak leaves they would gobble them up like potato chips. But they didn't get all that many or that often. 

[9 eggs today]

Smiles

:)