The vines started removing themselves

A few months back I wrote a little bit about using a single pole as a trellis for annual flowering vines. The one disadvantage of this single-pole method is that if the vines get heavy and you get some strong winds, you end up with something slightly different than an upright pole draped with vines.

You end up with a bent pole.

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That's what happened last week when 40-50 mph wind gusts got hold of this cypress vine pole:

So I'm going to take this opportunity to get rid of these vines, as they've been out of hand for at least a month, and they're done for the year anyway. As a reminder, this is what it looked like back in August, before it had really filled out:

Although it was green, fresh, and vertical then, you can see it's rather brown and not too much vertical anymore now. First I'll try to get it standing upright so I can better assess the situation:

That's not really possible, although these vines are anchoring it and keeping it from falling over in the other direction.

There's nothing I can do except knock it all the way over and pull all of the vines out.

I want to be a little careful since there is at least one plant growing down here that I want to salvage if possible, an Agastache foeniculum:

This chicken wire was in place to protect the vines from rabbits until they got established (the vines, not the rabbits). It made it impossible to just pull the vines out of the ground, so I had to cut many of the vines above the wire, pull them off, then pull the remnants out of the chicken wire.

It always amazes me how thick and woody a vine can get in just a few months:

The agastache pulled out of the loose, dry soil when I pulled out the vines:

I can easily plant it again when I'm finished here. It just takes a couple of seconds to pull the pole out of the tangle of vines -- that's a great advantage of the single-pole trellis. No tedious untangling of vines as you would have with a more complex trellis.

(I love the way some perennials produce some new basal growth at this time of year. It stays very small, and will survive the winter then start growing in the spring. I'm not sure why they do that exactly, but it seems to me like they're cheating a little and trying to get a head start on the other plants.)

Besides the agastache, there was also a dead bamboo rhizome in the soil here:

I'm not really sure how that got in there. Maybe it was in a pot that I reused when I planted the vines?

Anyway, with the pole removed I just have a big pile of vines on the ground, ready for the compost pile:

That's really the whole job done. I had to pull some of the vines off of the Japanese maple, the bloodgrass, and some of the other plants around here, but that was simple too.

It looks a lot cleaner with the vines gone, doesn't it?

I don't think I'll put a vine trellis here next year, although I'm not sure what I'll replace it with. I've got all winter to plan though.