Man, this is my weekend of frustration. Our lawn service (who have been frustrating in a lot of ways) decided to randomly weed-whack much further into the woods than normal, and cut a bunch of native blackberry. I'll have a mower next year, and it's hard to get a service late season so we are just sucking it up with them for now.

I was in the woods cutting more privet, multiflora rose, and japanese wineberry, and kept an eye out for the silky dogwoods I planted two weeks back. I found four of them, totally munched to about 3" from the ground. Hopefully they'll pop up next year fine. I guess I need to net things, but it adds more effort. My approach has been to plant cheap and many, but I think I just bought some deer a $100 meal instead.

We had a large ailanthus tree dropped yesterday. Big win for the local ecosystem, right? Get rid of this highly invasive tree, and host of the spotted lanternfly? Except they dropped it right in the stream. So there's nothing to do except cut it up and drag it out. Which means they are putting oil-soaked shavings right in the water from the chainsaws...