Round 3: Poison Ivy Wins

I love our new house, we have a huge yard and a large swath of forest behind us on city land that won't be developed. The downside is there is poison ivy everywhere in the forest. So far Michelle and I have done three rounds of thinning it out the hard way, by pulling up the roots. It would be easier to spray poison on them, but that would be less ecologically sound as the missus says.

On Sunday I helped Michelle pull out two ten gallon bags worth of poison ivy vines, and that only comprised maybe 5-10% of the Poison Ivy we have in our back yard. We had geared up for it with plastic bags covering our arms and then covered with latex gloves. Now everything was going fine and we were moving at a real good clip. Poison Ivy pulls out of the ground really easy as its roots don't seem to go very deep. After about an hour though our gloves and plastic bags were full of water from sweat, and then back to back both of us punctured our gloves on brush (not Poison Ivy itself.) Michelle only had a pin-prick tear so her poison ivy isn't that bad. I, on the other hand, tore a huge gash along my thumb on my right hand. The oil on my glove mixed with the water in the gloves and my arms were quickly covered.

A quick shower seems to have isolated it to the area around my wrist but in my rush to disrobe it looks like I also got some on my left wrist while taking off the glove, though just a smattering. I can already tell from what's shown up that its going to get really bad on my right arm, here's to a couple weeks of itching like mad. Hopefully we'll win in Round 4 like Michelle did in Round 2 where she used the same plastic bag/glove technique but didn't get any holes and as such no poison ivy.