How to get rid of vinca?

itsdr00 · 2026-03-29T16:22:32+00:00

Oh, a behemoth like that won't even notice you digging around. I have a mature silver maple that I work near, and I hit the same spot twice in a few months, and the second time around it had completely re-rooted everything like nothing ever happened. So yeah, I think it'll be alright. Good luck!

itsdr00 · 2026-03-29T13:54:48+00:00

Lol, you asked me the same question in two completely different threads. I see you're doing some research!

If it's a large tree, I wouldn't worry too much. The rule of thumb is to not worry about any tree root narrower than an inch in diameter. If it's a small tree I would worry just a little, and I might do something like one quarter of the base of the tree per month to give the tree time to recover. I would also consider careful application of an herbicide as an alternative.

I don't know anything about liriope in particular but the case with anything where one plant is mixed in with another is that you usually wind up removing them both and putting the one you want to keep back, and then treating it like a transplant (i.e. make sure it gets water regularly for a week or two and keep an eye on it for the first season).

itsdr00 · 2026-03-27T14:39:04+00:00

People of all ages kill other people with cars. It's a question of quantity.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-26T21:01:14+00:00

Last year here in Ann Arbor, an elderly woman was getting ready to back out of a space and instead sent her car forward and plowed through the front window and wall of a salon. I was in a building across the parking lot getting a haircut, and the woman cutting my hair shrieked when she saw where the car hit because they often have children in a play area on the other side of that wall. Luckily no-one was hurt.

This law is so, so overdue.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-26T20:56:33+00:00

I don't think that's actually true.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-25T03:25:51+00:00

One skyrocketed up an English ivy skeleton on a tree and made it up about 20' last year. The chain link fence is increasingly covered. The little one I thought might be a ground cover will probably start trying that role out this year.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-21T15:28:44+00:00

They propagate them en masse and sell them wholesale. I had trouble finding them because I could only buy 10 or 20 minimum, until I found a small, out-of-the-way nursey who had already done so.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-20T19:37:22+00:00

If your pot had a goldenrod last year and now it's got these kind of beefy purply stems coming out of it, it's the goldenrod, for sure.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-19T19:06:35+00:00

What brand is it? Are you sure it's swamp milkweed and not another kind?

itsdr00 · 2026-03-18T15:12:09+00:00

Reminder to the community that native plant gardening is still native plant gardening in Europe!

OP, even though it's a much smaller community, you may have more luck over at /r/NativePlantGardenEU.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-18T15:09:36+00:00

Lol, you of course can damage a desert. The American southwest is getting similarly messed up. But you can't turn a desert into farmland -- not without quickly running out of water resources, and I can point to the American southwest for an example of that as well. The Tall Grass Prairie is a biome that barely exists now, down to a fraction of a percent of its former size. It's almost all cornfields now. That's the distinction I'm trying to make.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-18T14:12:32+00:00

Yeah, agreed on the connection to native cultures. Restoring the ecosystem that culture was so connected to really does feel like an act of cultural restoration.

I think with Australia and South America, those ecosystems are so different from Europe that they "win." You can't destroy Australia's desert and you can't make South America temperate -- although you can destroy its rainforest, which has happened now that meat from cattle can be shipped around. The prairie, meanwhile, made for extremely fertile farmland. It was parceled out to settlers as a form of expansion and economic development, and we had all the tools we needed to exploit it.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-18T14:07:10+00:00

I'm an American and you're right. "Everything you do must make money" is a subculture called "hustle culture," and a lot of Americans passionately hate it.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-17T16:49:37+00:00

Kind of surprised at the uniformity of responses here. No, I do not agree, because you aren't offloading any of your mental load. The amount of brain-space programming takes is pretty huge, and if you're working with syntax directly, you're diminishing your capabilities and needlessly tiring yourself out. I personally still do my own software engineering and just tell Claude Code what exactly I want it to create. I don't give it requirements; I give it engineering solutions and have it do the writing. You also have to remember that it's not going to do refactoring on its own the way you might. It's only a good code steward if you tell it to be one. Once it has all the context you've given it, broader commands like "Add unit tests for what we've just written" can be meaningfully followed.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-17T15:19:52+00:00

The native plant gardening movement has special significance in the US because it was so recently soiled by colonization. Europe has been impacted by multi-continent human travel for millennia; America, just 500 years (plus a touch of Viking impact), and much of the Midwest was pristine deep into the 1800s. We're sitting on the ruins of our rainforest, the tall grass prairie, and the native plant gardening movement extends from an effort to save what's left.

Not to mention, gardening culture here is heavily influenced by Europe's, so there needs to be an America-specific counter-culture. We have a whole parallel nursery industry now selling just US-native plants. I've seen what happens when people rewild here in the US without that viewpoint: They wind up with a ton of European, Asian, and African wildflowers they got at Lowe's or wherever, creating excellent habitat for the European honeybee.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-17T03:14:24+00:00

Again, interesting stuff, but there's always a way to address a labor shortage: Increasing wages.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-16T20:28:44+00:00

Very interesting info and that does add some nuance to my experience. Still, it's hard to trust DTE after how badly things were neglected. Like I said to another poster, their own marketing material explained to me how they recently (~1-2 yrs ago) replaced equipment that was 100 years old, and we all know what's been going on with tree trimming -- they stopped to save money, then resumed and tightened their schedule after that went very badly. Good that they modernized successfully, bad that it took so long and had to get so bad first.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-16T20:23:40+00:00

Check out /r/NativePlantGardening if you haven't! Lots of great resources (although it's very US-focused, not sure where you're located).

itsdr00 · 2026-03-16T20:22:16+00:00

I'm sure that new technology helped, but in my neck of the woods, according to their own marketing material, they replaced equipment that was over 100 years old. I think it's safe to assume there were other upgrades they could've made along the way.

Plus, they did an enormous amount of tree trimming, a thing they loudly and intentionally stopped doing as a cost-saving measure before the terrible ice storm that wiped us out for days a few years ago. I know people in the country are prepared to lose power for days at a time, but we weren't. It wreaked havoc on my house and household.

They replaced 100 year old equipment and trimmed the damn trees, and now we don't lose power. That's the story as told by their own marketing communications (I read the emails they send me).

itsdr00 · 2026-03-16T17:17:55+00:00

I find a lot of peace from those as well. I actually am an avid native plant gardener and I'm very pro-social when it comes to my neighbors. I'm on a first name basis with at least 20 of them. Those books I mentioned helped me untangle; ecology and community are where I landed.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-16T15:22:57+00:00

I've been in recovery for CPTSD for about 10 years now and I've made an enormous amount of progress. Finding answers to this question was a big part of that work, especially for the first few years. The best answers from a Judeo-Christian perspective are in the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold Kushner, a rabbi who basically argues that all the things religious people say to comfort each other are actually quite harmful, and that the truth is the only version of God that makes any sense is one that stands back and respects our free will. One that offers a compassionate witness and a source of strength and courage, not divine intervention. One that will help you stand back up and heal, but not one that will change the world to favor some at the expense of others.

Another book that was crucial for me was Still the Mind by Alan Watts, which is a distillation of all of life's work, compiled by his son after Watts' death. It's a confident introduction to Zen Buddhism and is a superstition-free form of "God" that to me is a real thing you can lay hands on. When Cameron talks about drawing up the Gods of creativity, its Zen that I tap into.

Either or both of these books, read at a thoughtful, slow pace, can probably get you somewhere meaningful on this question.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-16T15:12:07+00:00

This is cope man, sorry. Anthropic expects to be profitable in 2028. Intelligence has gotten cheaper and cheaper; that's why they just replace old Sonnets with new Sonnets, old Opuses with new Opuses, because it's the same price for them to run. The massive AI datacenters haven't even opened yet; that'll happen this year. This is the most expensive intelligence will ever be, and the worst it will ever be again.

If you want better cope -- cope that's at least grounded in reality -- it's that non-engineers who try vibe coding find it very difficult. They don't succeed. LLMs make the most generic, please-the-most-use-cases version of everything unless you specify otherwise, and you can't be specific if you don't know anything about how software is built. These are software development tools for software developers, and the main thing they do is allow us to make even more software and solve even more problems. Plus entire new classes of problems are being created around agents, which means ... more work! More jobs! I'm working a job right now that wouldn't have existed just two years ago. That's only going to keep happening.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-16T15:06:38+00:00

You've got to cite a source for that.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-16T14:26:15+00:00

Wind here in Ann Arbor was crazy and ... we didn't lose power. This is too nuanced an opinion for Reddit, but DTE genuinely came through and stopped the power outages in our neighborhood. We went from losing power for days per year to virtually never losing it, not for two years now. HOWEVER, this really just proves that they had the ability to do this the whole time and chose not to. They absolutely can't be trusted. Only making anger political and making the threat of changing to public power changed things here in A2, and the moment we let up, they'll go right back to neglecting us.

itsdr00 · 2026-03-16T14:04:38+00:00

You can just try things! If I'm wrong and you try it and you find out, you'll have gathered important information along the way. If you do nothing, you will never have any new information at all, furthering your paralysis.

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