I've gotten lazy, the vines have not

I've posted about my annual vines before. I think I've even mentioned in those posts how by the end of the season I'll have more vines than I can handle. If I didn't say it, I should have. It happens every year. The interesting thing about annual vines is they start out slow, reach a certain size, then the next thing you know they're gigantic!

Unfortunately, this growth spurt happens in mid-to-late summer when I'm not watching all of the plants as closely as I was earlier in the year. So the vines get a little out of hand.

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Cypress vines in particular, at least in my garden. I've cut back the vines once already, but I should have done it again. I should do it again now. Soon.

I do love the way that trellis looks so massive covered in vines, but they're climbing over everything now.

It's too late to get them off of most of the other plants -- they're too entwined. Besides, it won't be long before temperatures drop below freezing and these guys all die.

So I'm just going to leave them alone.

Of course this probably means I'll have even more volunteer cypress vine seedlings next year, and they'll be growing pretty much everywhere. The vines in the lower left corner of this image are from a seedling that wasn't there a month or two ago I think:

Maybe I will have to hack some of these back... gotta reduce the seed count somehow.

Should be pretty easy to get these low ones that are smothering the Japanese blood grass:

These in the Japanese maple should be pretty simple to get too:

Here's one drawback to my "use a single electrical conduit pole as a trellis" trick:

When the vines get heavy enough, and it gets windy enough, the pole bends. There's no way to straighten this out without adding another pole or two for support. Maybe I should just remove it altogether... it would reduce cleanup in the coming weeks. Plus the hummingbirds are gone, so the flowers are "going to waste" (not really, because I think bees are still visiting them). We'll see. I'm not really keen on making more work for myself outside right now, as I've got a lot going on for the next week or so, and garden time will be hard to come by...

Maybe I'll just hope for a strong wind from the opposite direction, and it will straighten the pole out for me! (Gardeners are eternal optimists.)