Edge Hill has fertile soil.  This is a double-edged sword – great for corn and tomatoes,

but not so great for keeping your house from being devoured by Virginia Creeper and poison ivy.

(Luckily, this is the slave house – even the main house wasn’t quite this bad.)

The stranglers were inching their way up to the second-story windows of the house even though Chad had ripped them all down within the last year.  Two weeks ago, Chad went at the vines with a chemical assault (Round Up), weakening their defenses.   After the withering had begun, we picked a perfect evening to take our first stab at “landscaping.”

We grabbed some shovels, shears, and work gloves –

– and began hacking away at the Virginia Creeper around the front of the house.

We started by giving the plants’ foliage a buzz cut, and discovered one of the reasons we’ve had so many bugs inside our house.  Major ant, wasp, and cricket habitat (Chad took a stinger to the hand with the first cut).  There were also dozens of well-fed praying mantises who evidently got too stuffed to keep the thriving insect population at bay.

After trimming back the ground growth, we stumbled upon a magical outdoor liquor cabinet:

As we peeled back the layers of scrub, we found the step we had been tripping over for months, decorated with a few beer cans and shreds of plastic.

After a few more slashes with the shears and an epic battle between our lower backs and some well-rooted vines, we had made great, great progress.

When we came back a few days later to pick up the trash and sweep off the porch, we found ANOTHER HOUSE TREASURE:

“Edge Hill”

“1920”

If you look closely, you can see the above inscriptions are etched into the concrete step leading onto the front porch of the house.

After we cleared the above-ground portion of the plants, we brought in a tiller to turn over the cleared ground and prepare the bed for planting.  Depending on the weather, we’re hoping to write about Landscaping: Phase 2 later this week!