Brooke here:

The ivy removal continues, but slowly.  Things hit a snag yesterday when I went after an enormous tangle of ivy and wisteria on another section of the fence.

I was making some decent progress until the fence started to wobble and I realized the ivy was structural.  The metal poles on the right side of the image are the gate supports, and I had thought there was more metal buried somewhere within the mess, but it was the same old rotten wood with green chain link that’s falling down around the front of the house.  The vegetation will have to stay as-is until we get around to fixing this section of the fence, and then we’ll tear out everything at once.  It might be on this year’s project list, I don’t know… the gate is held closed by a bungie cord so it’ll need to be taken care of sooner than later.

And in pursuit of the perfect moss garden, I’ve degraded into crazed petty theft.  Old parking lots have some great moss in their oh-so-many nooks and crannies, and I’ve been … I think the popular word is “rehoming” … pieces of it.  But the Internet has failed me.  Moss gardens are a novelty or a weed or both,* and information on how to cultivate different varieties is almost impossible to find.  Heck, any information on moss at all seems to be limited to a bare handful of the more common ones, and I’m left wondering whether my newly-appropriated greenery will even survive without regular exposure to gas fumes, cigarette butts, and urine.

* I told my sister, a new transplant to Portland, about starting a moss garden. She let me know that in Oregon, moss was not something you “gardened,” it was something you scraped off of your driveway with a shovel, then dunked into a 75-25 mixture of hot water and bleach.