My backyard is a toxic swampy jungle!

[Seedling]

Ah. . . I have a back yard. And dirt in my hair. And a rash. Life is great, and I mean that with utter sincerity!

My husband and I bought a house. We’re still reeling from this. Holy crap, this tidy little box is ours, the swamp out back is OURS! *boggle*

We still haven’t unpacked everything. Years of being cooped up in apartments has left us starved for gardening. So now we have a patch of tomato plants, and a squad of blueberry bushes. There are fewer weeds and still far too many boxes that need to be opened.

The yard has lots of poison ivy. I find this funny, because I’m one of the only people I know who can recognize it well enough to tell it from Virginia Creeper and Jack-in-the-Pulpit and all that other lovely harmless greenery. I can safely avoid the stuff, and so can my husband. But I have to kill it. The stuff is my nemesis, as established by childhood rashes and a stinking inability to eat fresh mango or cashew without itchy consequences – mango and cashew being in the same plant family. I even went a little stompy-happy this week and scrunched some of the younger plants under my shoes. That wasn’t smart, because apparently I handled my shoes a little too much afterward and then of all the stupid things *picked my nose*, so now I have a rash around each nostril. Poop. Serves me right. I really knew better than to leave urushiol on my shoes.

Surprise number two: the healthy and lovely fifteen-foot shrub overhanging the back yard from the swampy bit is poison sumac. I don’t know how the previous owners didn’t figure out where their rashes were coming from. Whomever mowed the lawn only had to do a *face plant* into this bush every time they pushed the mower under its overhang. I wasn’t sure that anyone could be so stupid as to keep the most dangerous North American plant as an ornamental shrub, so I googled. Pink stems, fern-like configurations of leaves, white, drooping berries, growing out of a swamp – yup. Poison sumac is rare enough that it is hard to find even when looking for it, few people can identify it correctly, and most sumac websites are in need of good photos which I may be able to supply them with. A test on my ankle confirmed that it is poison sumac – a pin-head sized drop of sap has left a rash the width of a #2 pencil eraser, and about the same color.

I can’t help being amused by this, however. We own a rare giant toxic plant! That’s almost as cool as having a gelatinous cube on a leash.

I suppose we’ll have to cut it down before the neighbor’s kids discover it the hard way. And because it is my nemesis, after all. (As a child my face once bore a striking resemblance to a tomato; the doctor said I’d run into poison sumac. Thus followed a few years of much paranoia concerning all innocent forms of sumac.) But the consolation prize is a nice bit of swamp to plant irises in. And cranberries. And carnivorous pitcher plants, which are sold at a local nursery. There’s more than one way to stock a yard with monsters, I suppose. ;-)

I’ll post some photos if I ever find the cables for my camera. Do any of you have fun poison plant stories, or unexpected things in your backyard?

[Carnifex]

hmm,nothing as good as yours,but a recent example might be that i was at a bar with friends,and as we look to the wall,suddenly a green grasshopper the size of my middlefinger is crawling there. needless to say we jumped out of our skin for a moment :$

[Rhynome]

Reading your post I couldn't help but think of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.

By any chance does Poison Sumac look anything at all like Audrey II?
Is there anything in your garden that looks even the slightest like Audrey II? If so, don't feed it!

[DavePalumbo]

The title actually made me think of Fletch Lives.

Whatever you do, don't burn the Sumac! Wait, did you say there's Poison Ivy too? You have two different kinds of contact-poison plants in your yard?

[Seedling]

I keep wondering if cricket would be good fried up and dipped in ketchup.

Haha, I haven’t thought of Little Shop of Horrors in years! Come to think of it, jack-in-the-pulpit flowers to look a bit like little Audreys. . .

You have two different kinds of contact-poison plants in your yard?

Yes! Do I get an award for that? Oooh, do I get more points if I find poison oak out there as well?

[joelhinxman]

I keep wondering if cricket would be good fried up and dipped in ketchup.
there was a marathon of that bizzar foods show on the travel channel yesterday and he ate cricket and seamed to like it quite a bit.

i dont really remeber anything to clearly about poison plants its all just kinda blurry red itchty memories. i did however recently discover that there was water leak under the floor under my bed and being that my bed is just a stack of futons on the floor they just kinda sucked up all the water and never gave any sign of the water being there and i discoverd it when i was doing my yearly kicking the crap out of the futon to fluff it up. it was a nice big black moldy spot on the wood floor and the bottom futon. kinda wonderd why i had been so sick lately. god i hate all the mold of the pasific northwest.

[Rhynome]

I keep wondering if cricket would be good fried up and dipped in ketchup.

They're kosher too! So you can feed them to any Jewish (or Muslim, for that matter... or anyone non-veggie or non-squeamish) guests.

[Zirngibism]

Ooo, I like this thread, and have an interesting backyard. Well, actually, it's like the side of my yard- a couple acres. Anyway, we have this extremely black soil that looks incredibly fertile when really it's pretty useless for gardening.

The whole place is choked with tiny trees that probably can't get much bigger because of how close together they're growing- or maybe the poor quality of the soil.

Anyway, I remember digging back there, and no matter where, I struck water about 3 feet down. My father and I were discussing this, and it seems quite likely that the whole area has an underground lake. My theory is that the reason why it hasn't "caved in" is probably because the dense roots from the trees are holding the soil together ontop. This would also explain the stunted growth of the trees in that area (them not having much room for their roots). If we were to take in some trucks and dig a few feet in, we might have ourselves a nice sized lake.

Oh, and something I found out about poison ivy/oak: don't let a stem break and get stem-juice on your skin. It'll likely go into your bloodstream, and then it will spread to new parts of your body even over a week after the first contact. My brother could show you fristhand.

Oh yeah, and it's covered with skunk cabbage, which isn't a dangerous North American plant but certainly one of the coolest!

[asoir]

That's awesome, you should be inspired! Paint that swamp!

[Seedling]

Skunk cabbage! We’ve got a lot of it back in the muddy areas. After reading this ( http://www.natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic4/skunkcabbage.htm) skunk cabbage is one of my new favorites. It’s warm-blooded! Yet another leafy swamp monster.

. . . I struck water about 3 feet down.

That’s the water table, not an underground lake. :-) What does other undeveloped land in your region look like?


Oh, and something I found out about poison ivy/oak: don't let a stem break and get stem-juice on your skin. It'll likely go into your bloodstream, and then it will spread to new parts of your body even over a week after the first contact. My brother could show you fristhand.

The dangerous chemical in this family of plants is urushiol. It spreads on contact. It is an oil, and like oil paints, it’s easily transferred around. Those secondary rashes are most likely from your brother getting the sap on his hands or clothes and then touching himself. This is why the rash is called “contact dermatitis”.

Many people also think that scratching the rash can cause it to be spread to other parts of the body. That’s not true, either. The rash can show up between a day and a week from exposure. The rashes that appear later are from the initial exposure, too; they were just exposed less and took longer to show themselves.

Crap, I love this trivia. :-)

That's awesome, you should be inspired! Paint that swamp!

Aye aye cap'n!

[Cwn Annwn]

Wow. And they say Australia is full of poisonous things...
I think you guys are winning so far on the poisonous plants!

The weirdest thing I found in my garden was a flower, which I thought was pretty. Pink and floofy with dusty greyish foliage. I ended up grabbing the dead seed heads and sowing the seeds. I grew it for a few years before a friend pointed out it was opium poppy and illegal to grow. :( No more pink poppies for me.

[glikster]

congrats on the house, Seedling! I just got one, too. No exciting shrubberies though.

[Seedling]

Haha! Nono, Australia wins the dangerous contest, I’m sure. Everything you guys grow over there comes in Dangerous, Lethal, and OMFG levels. ;-)

When I was very young my family was stationed in the Philippines for a couple of years. I have crazy little kid memories of everyone being paranoid about, well, everything in the wild there. Australia sounds like it has a similar concentration of scary beasties and crawlies. I would love to come see them first-hand someday.

That’s funny about the poppies. We have a church in there parts where marijuana is growing wild in the grass. It makes me wonder who else has noticed.

Thanks glikster! And congrats! :-)

[magicgoo]

Pictures, Seedling! This thread needs pics! :}

After me and my husband moved to our first house 2 years ago, we noticed that little plants popped up everywhere in our yard, and they sprouted up way faster than normal weeds. I went out to pull them, and they stunk. They smelled like sour mud. A few days later, more popped up. They were like a virus. I let one grow and in a few months, it was taller than I was! It was still fragile enough to yank right out of the ground even at that height though. I had to know what these things were. 2 weeks of internet research later, I found they were Chinese Sumac trees. Totally harmless, excessively fast growing, full size trees. They get up to 25/30 feet high. 2 years later, I still have to weed them from our yard in the Spring through Summer. I'm always curious: If I let them all grow, would our yard be just one thick stinky forest?

Anyhow, good luck with removing your poison sumacs. Sounds scary and dangerous :(

[Dose206]

congrats on the house seedling.

last week I found out that my boy has mildly serious reactions to mosquito bites, and this week he gets poison ivy. what an unlucky kid.

[Magic Man]

It sounds like you live on Dagoba or something?!

Anyhow, congrats on your new place =)

[Seedling]

Thanks guys! Massachusetts, actually, Magic Man, although I believe Yoda would be at home out back among the skunk cabbage and the bugs. ;-) Dose, I totally sympathize with your son! This stuff itches like hell and I’ve hardly got any on me. Hopefully these pictures will help you guys avoid the stuff in the future.

Magicgoo, haha! I would love to race your sumac against the milkweed that keeps popping up in our sorry excuse for a lawn.

Pictures! Here are the paths leading back through the trees, and the skunk cabbage bog which I will now forever think of as “Dagoba”, and some pictures of my favorite plants. The picture of the vine is the Great Mother of All Poison Ivy, and at the ground she’s as big around as my arm at the elbow. I’m kind of tempted not to kill her, because she is magnificent and her foliage is safely out of reach. But she’s seeding the yard with her offspring. Too bad poison ivy can’t be neutered.

[Magic Man]

THAT is your back yard? Fucking awesome!

But it looks more like Endor than Dogoba. I kinda expected mud, lots of it, stinking bogs, bubbling spewing mud and giant wasps =(

[Seedling]

Thanks1 The Ewoks were all eaten by the poison ivy. ;-)

I actually haven't seen a good chunk of the rear of the property, because I need waders to get there. There's a lot of mud under those skunk cabbages. And somewhere in the adjacent property there is a tendril of the Charles River.

[Costau D]

Next time you're raking leaves in the front yard and kids jump in the pile and mess it all up, they will be in for a surprise...

[Ilaekae]

I live in a section of post-industrial Pennsylvania with 20th century growth, which is a polite way of saying that they gathered up all the rusty cars and refrigerators they could find from 1930 to 1950, filled them with toxic waste, and buried them in the acid-filled holes left from strip mining, then covered it with a layer of "dirt" and built my house on it. The back yard is a haven for chipmunks, rabbits, three herd of deer, about 3000 garter snakes, and a family of black snakes about seven to eight feet long that constantly get into the house and end up fighting with the six cats. It's not a pretty sight to wake up with a chewed-up garter snake on your pillow and a distraught cat waiting for you to "fix it" so he can play some more...

Right in the middle of this mess, I just built from scratch a "picnic" table 4.5 feet wide and twelve feet long that weighs over 600 pounds and will hold at least 8-9 tons easily, and probably twice that in a pinch. I needed a place to work on my sculpting stuff...

In about a month, I'm going to start work on two "sheds," one 16 x 12, the other 9 x 12, both insulated and waterproof like little houses so I can store my wife's mother's furniture in one and my house full of tools in the other. When everything's done, I'll post pictures. if you don't see any posts from me after...say...September, I fell off the shed roof while shingling, so send my wife a condolence card. She'll be touring Alabama and Mississippi with my life insurance proceeds...

Oh...and did you know that if you lay on the ground swearing in six languages under a picnic table tightening lag bolts, two 150-pound bucks with 12-point racks will come down from the woods and stick their heads under to see what you're up to? I now work with a loaded .357 in my tool box...

[Seedling]

Wow Ilaekae, I love your stories! :-)

[Magic Man]

I live in a section of post-industrial Pennsylvania with 20th century growth, which is a polite way of saying that they gathered up all the rusty cars and refrigerators they could find from 1930 to 1950, filled them with toxic waste, and buried them in the acid-filled holes left from strip mining, then covered it with a layer of "dirt" and built my house on it. The back yard is a haven for chipmunks, rabbits, three herd of deer, about 3000 garter snakes, and a family of black snakes about seven to eight feet long that constantly get into the house and end up fighting with the six cats. It's not a pretty sight to wake up with a chewed-up garter snake on your pillow and a distraught cat waiting for you to "fix it" so he can play some more...

Right in the middle of this mess, I just built from scratch a "picnic" table 4.5 feet wide and twelve feet long that weighs over 600 pounds and will hold at least 8-9 tons easily, and probably twice that in a pinch. I needed a place to work on my sculpting stuff...

In about a month, I'm going to start work on two "sheds," one 16 x 12, the other 9 x 12, both insulated and waterproof like little houses so I can store my wife's mother's furniture in one and my house full of tools in the other. When everything's done, I'll post pictures. if you don't see any posts from me after...say...September, I fell off the shed roof while shingling, so send my wife a condolence card. She'll be touring Alabama and Mississippi with my life insurance proceeds...

Oh...and did you know that if you lay on the ground swearing in six languages under a picnic table tightening lag bolts, two 150-pound bucks with 12-point racks will come down from the woods and stick their heads under to see what you're up to? I now work with a loaded .357 in my tool box...

Your stories make me want to see your art =(

[Brendan N]

Ilaekae I think you hijacked one of the coolest threads ever haha.

Cool backyard Seedling, it's freakin huge and very cool. Judging from the photos, you can go so far that there's absolutely no house in sight yes? that has to be great if so, you can get away from home without ever leaving it haha.
Congrats!

[MarkHarchar]

Congradulations Seedling! Home ownship....well home ownership sucks, but congradulations anyway! :)

I have a woodchuck condominium in my yard in NE PA. There are like three entrances, 4 woodchucks, a white wood fence, minimart....

Also, I have a natural sping under my yard that follows the watertable off of the mountain I'm on. At one point, it raised a 9 square foot section 12 inches in a mound. When you stood on it, it moved like a waterbed. I found this, 1..2...8 foot pipe into it and water start squirting out like old faithful. Nature Rocks!

[Ilaekae]

Seedling, your backyard is beautiful! I'm SOOOOOOOOOOO jealous...

Mine ends at an undeveloped 30 acre hill that is a mass of regular sumac, locust and maple and the neighborhood kids have built a huge mound at the top of it that they use for racing and jumping their quads (is that what they call those little carts that sound like lawnmowers?). Sounds like Daytona here some days...

Sorry, Magic'... All my art is on hold until I finish rebuilding the guts of the house and the back sheds. I literally don't have any space to work anymore. It's one of the problems that suddenly appears when you get old... When I closed my business and lost my warehouse storage at the same time, all that crap had to move somewhere...and then the last of my wife's family passed away and we ended up with the equivalent of three homes full of "stuff" to squeeze into our little mess. There's literally been piles of it stored under tarps sitting on our lawn and driveway for over a year just rotting away, and we had to rent another warehouse setup to store furniture and stuff we don't want to lose...

To the good, I've become the "space engineer/carpenter/storage expert" from hell...and a neighbor just gave me his huge patio doors to use as pallets, so it IS getting there. I did find something funny involving a piece of my art though...if I can make a copy of it, I'll post it here...I'm pretty sure I'm the first poster here with a piece of art that can be seen from space...heeheeheehee...

[Ilaekae]

Alright...I think this will work...

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=spruce+street,+finleyville+pa&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=53.961216,79.277344&ie=UTF8&ll=40.261197,-80.009737&spn=0.001605,0.002419&t=k&z=19&iwloc=addr&om=1

If you click on the link, it should take you to a google pic of my house. It's "L" shaped dead center in the pic. In the back yard is a bright red rectangle.

This red thing is a badly damaged painting on masonite from my show in 1970 that we had to destroy, but decided to cover other stuff with it temporarily to keep the rain off. It's (or was, to be correct) an acrylic on masonite 4 feet by 8 feet called "Final Demon..." I can't get it any closer for detail, but I'm pretty sure nobody else here has ever posted any of their artwork via the google satelite... :tihi:

[Magic Man]

Seriously Ilaekae, you hijack threads in the funniest bloody ways possible hahaha.

I had a look at the google image...that piece of art must have been bloody massive!

[egerie]

Seedling, I could never tell any of these appart! I don't think we have poison ivy anywhere in my region or where I grew up. I wonder how it compares to Urtica (or Orties).. Anyways, nice but yikes!

[Costau D]

Only thing I can say interesting about my backyard was that it had water moccassins alligators thorns and swamp. Use to trek back there I was 10, and it's scary almost getting lost and seeing your first water moccassin...GOOD TIMES! Yeah...Floridas a fun place. Haha sad thing is my first home really did have a swamp, 3 acres of it.

[magicgoo]

WOW, Seedling!!! I am sooo jealous of your backyard! It's GORGEOUS! Thanks for the pics. Maybe now, I'll be poison-aware if I ever travel back that way :)

My backyard is so dry (we live in between the Mojave desert and Los Angeles) compared to yours. Like two entirely different worlds. The only thing you have to be scared of is rattlesnakes, but they stay out of the city.

[Carnifex]

wow,yeah,that backyard is totally different from what i expected :o great stuff.
reminds me of our grannies summer cottage in sweden,i'll have to scan pics some day...

[Seedling]

Pics! Lets see some other backyards! :-) Share!

[Mungus]

Great backyard Seedling (by name and by nature), don't change a thing! <except maybe uprooting the poisonous bits, (there are some sprays which are safe for the soil) >
I love it when there's a tendency to wildness, the natural state of a healthy swamp/copse. Pruned and trimmed gardens are a waste of time and effort, unless you're getting something in return, like some veggies.


My claim to poisonous fame - my hand zinged for three hours after touching a Gympie-Gympie leaf. Glad I didn't wipe my bum with it. >:{

[MarkBehm]

Tendril of a river and poison ivy back there? Check for Jewel weed (http://foragingpictures.com/plants/Jewelweed/) back there too. They seem to like to grow together. Especially in the northeast. In my experience, it's been at least as effective as the commercial stuff with urushiol.

[Cwn Annwn]

Seedling - That's a backyard?! I'd glady trade my small dusty dry sandpit for your poison filled green wonderland. :|

[Rhynome]

Seedling - That's a backyard?! I'd glady trade my small dusty dry sandpit for your poison filled green wonderland. :|

You see, you just don't know how to enjoy what you have. Buy blue contact lenses and pretend you're in the Dune universe. Wahay, your 'dusty dry sandpit' suddenly becomes a thousand times more fun!

Shame contacts only cover the Iris, though (and yes, even if you do have blue eyes, contact lenses, they can make the colour near unnaturally vivid, it's a nice touch).

[waronmars]

My backyard has a small graveyard full of various pets that I went through growing up lol. A large amount of mice, fish, guinea pigs, a few birds and a snake that the cat was playing with and mum killed!

I'm in trouble when the dead walk...

On the living side we have little lizards and geckos in our backyard, ringtailed possums, kookaburras, lorikeets, magpies and very occasionally scrub turkeys and blue tongue lizards from nearby bushland. I've seen a few green snakes but nothing too scary! I guess there's redback spiders out there somewhere, I'm not gonna go looking tho haha. I try to steer clear of the more poisonous Aussies.

Ah and we have some nice weeds too! Alot of Lantana and a creeper with itchy leaves and yellow flowers I never identified. Plus pretty much the whole lawn is one big mass of weeds. Whatever grows in a drought, eh?

[RebornBacon]

I used to live on a farm in rural victoria, we had all sorts of wildlife, kangaroos, koalas, kookaburras, the little kangaroos and rabbits oh god so many rabbits.

nothing poisenous though.

[Seedling]

Wow, all this talk of Australian wildlife is so cool. :-) Koalas in the backyard! Your backyard couldn’t be cooler unless it was on another planet.

Abo – thank you! The non-swampy parts back there are filled with jewel weed. I was wondering what plant it was. I pulled up a bunch from the area I set up to be a berry patch – it’s polite stuff, very short roots, no thorns or anything. Good on poison ivy rashes, you say? I’ll report back with experimental data. . . (heads for the garden).

[Cat]

well, this isn't about poisenous plants but about poisenous bugs that live on trees..
A couple of months ago half the country (which sounds bigger then it is...) was infested with processionary caterpillars!! Firefighters had to suit up and burn the mofos from the trees because it was getting out of hand!
They prefer to house on oak trees and the tiny hairs cause VERY itchy rashes that last for weeks! In some parts of the country people couldn't even dry their laundry outside cause they were everywhere!

Guess it's because of the warm winter we had, there's always too many bugs after a winter like that :nohope:

Uughh, i'm starting to itch again thinking about it :$

Seedling, your garden looks great! what a view!

[Seedling]

Hey, Cat, I saw some pictures of that bug invasion, I think. Was it worms that tented everything they crawled on in silk? I saw some otherworldly photos of a tree and bicycle completely engulfed. *shudder*

Once in the US in Virginia I got to witness the 16-year cicada invasion. It was as loud outside as power equipment from their singing, and you couldn’t walk outside without having a few of the beasties land on you. My neighbor had a bucket filled with cicada shells in her garage for the longest time after that.

Update: Jewel Leaf is a bit like aloe in its stem. It doesn’t seem to have helped much, aside from being cold and gooey. I’ll try it a few more times to see what results I get. (I’ve even got control rashes for this experiment. Meh.)

The spot on my ankle where I tested a pinhead-sized drop of poison sumac a week ago is now the size of a silver dollar, which tells me I need to stay the bloody hell away from that tree. I’ll be hiring a hitman to take it out.

[MarkBehm]

Oww. In my experience, the jewel weed only works pre rash. You have to be very quick. A bit more like a soap than a slave.

My wife is super sensitive to poison ivy. She ends up on steroids nearly every time she gets exposed. JWeed has saved her butt a few times she's stumbled thru a patch of poison ivy.

I don't know if it works with sumac as the oil is different. Sounds like it doesn't for you. :[