A Labor of Love and Spite

I'm not proud of the fact that I'm primarily motivated by spite, but sometimes that petty motivation can take me farther than I ever imagined.

Back in 2021, Joel and I bought this farm, and the first summer, all I wanted to do was get from the front field to the back field without having to walk ALLLL the way around. The old stone wall had been overgrown with trees and barberry (the consequences of not being able to mow a stone wall) and so I bravely went forth with a pair of wildly undersized loppers and a dream to bushwhack a path. 

Well, the barberry got the best of me that day. I was scratched up and full of rage, without making much of a dent in the thick woody stems. As anyone who has tried to wrangle barberry surely knows the thorns are no joke, and after bending (and breaking) my loppers, I lay awake that night contemplating murder.

Thus, spite was born in my heart, and my mental health (hanging by a thread) seemed to improve the more barberry I murdered. I bought bigger and bigger pairs of loppers, and then joyfully discovered that it was …slightly… easier to kill our first winter on the farm. When all the leaves died back, we could finally see the shape of the stems I had been valiantly whacking at all summer. 

And then we got the tractor and a big chain out there and started removing barberry in a big way- pulling out whole massive 10’-15’ wide bushes that were taller than me! And the whole time, I just got more and more furious every time I spotted barberry being planted ON PURPOSE around my community. 

It’s not enough to remove the barberry infesting MY woods- I need you ALL to know about barberry and get spiteful too. But as I got more vocal about my hatred, the more I realized people didn’t even know what barberry was. Well. 

I clearly can’t talk to EVERYONE about it. But I *can* sell you an embroidery kit featuring barberry, and give you spite-honed tips for removing it whenever you encounter it. And if enough of you get out there and ALSO get weird about it, then maybe one day we can get rid of this jerk- and tackle some of my other least-favorite invasive species along the way! 

My goals are more noble now- we’ve got dreams of reintroducing native species in the place of removed invasive ones and restoring the landscape to make it more diverse and climate-resilient in our swiftly changing environment. But it started from spite against that one horrible barberry bush that broke my loppers, and isn’t that kind of a beautiful thing?