Thank you Bobby! After pulling it out I saw a lot more of the same in areas between properties in the neighborhood. The folks who were here years before me were great gardeners before they couldn’t keep it up and buried everything under pine straw. I keep encountering new plants that just plain sprout out of the ground once the straw was moved and a little sun hit.

The cool morning and nights last week is a time in the spring that my grand pappy’s pappy called “blackberry winter”. And so it was that pert’near all the brier patches bloomed at that time. Later in the summer we would brave the chiggers, copperheads and thorns for some fresh blackberries so granny could make some blackberry dumplins, jellies and jams. What a treat! These days you might want to pull it up from your front yard unless your HOA allows brier patches in the hood.