Gardening Pratfalls

Spent another gorgeous day in paradise here yesterday, doing more yard work. As you can see, the back yard annual flower bed came out pretty nice. I love the way everything looks with fresh mulch. Those impatiens will really fill in the entire flower bed and look nice the rest of the summer. We also got in our tomatoes, although we haven't had much luck with those since we moved to Medford. We had a very nice spot for them at our Weymouth house, where they got full sunshine. But there is no spot in our backyard with sun during most of the daylight hours, except for our deck, so the tomato plants, being the sun worshipers they are, suffer.

But, as a famous man once said, "For a price, Ugarte. For a price." And the price I had to pay for my diligence is a case of poison ivy. While our yard itself doesn't have any, the small, untamed patch of woods behind the back fence is rife with the vile plants. So they try to make inroads into our backyard and I guess I must have pulled up one too many "weeds".

I've had a few run-ins with it in the past. I remember working outdoors on a place one summer as a teenager when the owners asked if I "got" poison ivy. I said I didn't know but within the next few days it became painful obvious that I very much did. I'm not wildly allergic to the stuff, though. One childhood friend of mine was so allergic to it she could catch it just being windblown. But I have had some serious altercations with poison ivy and other related noxious plants. One winter, visiting the folks in Oklahoma City, I got a bad rash from some plant or another after going to pick mistletoe. My arms, legs and neck were covered in the stuff. Some pretty funny (in hindsight) pictures of the time, with all the white lotion on me.

I venture out beyond the back fence in a yearly ritual of trimming the tops of the trees, which gives us a very nice view of Boston to the south. The first year I did it, I blithely went about my tree climbing in shorts and a t-shirt and paid a serious price in poison ivy rash. Ever since then, I wait for a cool day and wear long pants, long sleeve shirt, gloves and a hat. I come in and my wife treats me like I've just come back from a radioactive waste site. I slip in and dump all my clothes directly into the washmachine, where they get washed a couple of times. Even better, I wear old clothes so I can just throw them away, as the oils from this pernicious weed are amazingly tough to remove.

My wife is understandably terrified of the plants. One summer day, she spent the afternoon tearing down vines from the front of our old house, proudly showing off the results. However, when they turned out to be poison ivy, she paid a terrible price, and spent many days with lotions and potions, trying to ease the itching. So now she is extra careful and avoids anything even remotely resembling the oily, reddish leaves of the plant.

One year, some guys came to cut down some trees behind our house. As they were nice oak trees, I asked if I could have the wood. They said sure, and I started carting it into the garage to dry it out. After I finished lugging the pieces, they asked if I "got" poison ivy. Oh oh. Turns out the trees had a couple of vines wrapped around them. I didn't get it too bad, but I treated them like a toxic waste dump. I let them sit unmolested for a year, and then I carefully, using a pole, pried off the dead vines and put them in the garbage cans.

I'll probably head off to the drug store to pick something up for it. I've seen some new treatment advertised from some big skin creme company (forget who), so maybe I'll give that a try. It isn't too bad though. A hot shower usually does the trick for me for a bit. Those impatiens had better bloom nicely this year!

Update: It was Cortaid with the new poison ivy treatment, But their Poison Ivy Care Treatment Kit was nearly US$40! And the other highly recommended lotion, Zanfel, was US$38 - yikes! Didn't realize curing poison ivy was so expensive. I guess if it is killing you, it is a small price to pay. But my rash isn't $40 worth, so I bought some Tecnu Extreme, which still cost $13. I've been using some Tecnu Outdoor Skin Cleanser, an more basic lotion, and it seems to work okay so far. I'll let you know how it works. We always used to use the old standby, Calamine Lotion, which cost about $5. Ah, the price of progress.